Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Garden of Eden

• New

  The Impossible Calculator

  Andre Popovitch

  Google Android’s calculator is (probably) the most widely used calculator in the world. It’s also the most advanced.

• The First Day

  The Editors

  In the beginning, the Editors created a theme: Origins. Now the issue was formless and empty, blankness was over the pages, and the spirit of inspiration was hovering in the blinking cursor.

• interview

  Consciousness Catching Its Own Tail

  Ruben Laukkonen

  A conversation about predictive processing, insight, and existential threats — to the self and to society.

• What Are Schools For?

  Agustina Paglayan

  The modern education system around the world continues to bear the imprint of mass education’s original goal: obedience.

• interview

  How to Triage Billions in Aid Cuts

  Robert Rosenbaum

  Inside PRO's rapid effort to connect private donors with the most cost-effective programs affected by USAID cuts.

• interview

  Does AI Progress Have a Speed Limit?

  Ajeya Cotra Arvind Narayanan

  A conversation about the factors that might slow down the pace of AI development, what could happen next, and whether we’ll be able to see it coming.

• Brain Freeze

  Aurelia Song Charlie Dever

  The idea of cryonics — freezing the bodies of the dead in the hopes that they can one day be revived — has existed since the 1960s. We’ve since learned that perfect preservation is much, much harder than any of its founders anticipated.

• Can We Trust Social Science Yet?

  Ryan Briggs

  Everyone likes the idea of evidence-based policy, but it’s hard to realize it when our most reputable social science journals are still publishing poor quality research.

• Reports of the Death of California High-Speed Rail Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

  Rob Davidoff

  Building a high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco was never going to be easy — but the critics who write it off are missing the real source of the project’s struggles.

• The Georgist Roots of American Libertarianism

  Reed Schwartz

  Few thinkers have been championed by such a wide range of political coalitions, from American Progressives to Taiwanese anti-communists, early Zionists to the global Green Party. So how did American libertarianism come to embrace Henry George, too?

• The Origin of the Research University

  Clara Collier

  Universities have existed for more than a thousand years — and for almost all of that time, they weren’t centers of research. What changed in 19th century Germany?

• The Universal Tech Tree

  Étienne Fortier-Dubois

  When we try and pick out any technology in isolation, we find it hitched, in some way, to every innovation that preceded it. (Except for the Oldowan hand axe. We had to start somewhere.)

• Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice

  Abi Olvera

  America’s roads are more dangerous than those of almost every country in the developed world. We know how to change that.

• fiction

  Knockout Mouse

  Louis Evans

  “Cancer is extremely varied and adaptive, and is likely the hardest of these diseases to fully destroy.” — Dario Amodei