In which John Green investigates war, and what exactly it may or may not be good for. Was war a result of human beings organizing into larger and more complex agricultural social orders, or did war maybe create agriculture and...

In which John Green teaches you about nonviolence and peace movements in the 20th century. What is nonviolence? What is a peace movement? Well. traditionally, humans often resort to violence when they come into conflict. In the 20th...

In which John Green teaches you about the end of World History, and the end of the world as we know it, kind of. For the last hundred years or so, it seemed that one important ingredient for running an economically successful country was...

Do you dream in color? For part of the 20th century, it was so rare, psychologists thought it meant something was wrong with you. For a generation, people dreamed in black and white, and TV might be to blame.



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In the wake of World War 2, Clair Patterson embarked on a scientific quest to find out how old the Earth really is. His hard work paid off, but it also revealed a modern danger.

Midlife doesn't have to be a scary time, says entrepreneur Chip Conley. In this short yet profound talk, he takes inspiration from the natural world to reframe our 40s, 50s and 60s as a transitional stage that's full of grace and beauty...

As the Earth warms due to human-caused climate change, billions of people in the developing world will face life-threatening heat waves, raising the demand for air conditioning. But powering all of that cooling is going to take more...

Climate justice is taking center stage -- geopolitically, socially and morally. In a contagiously courageous conversation, Member of Parliament in the UK David Lammy and Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson discuss how brave...

You often hear of brilliant scientific discoveries that took decades to become recognized, often by scientists too smart for their time! Join Hank and look back on a few of our episodes about scientists who deserve a little more...

In a prelude to the expected battle over the next Supreme Court justice nomination, an historian explains the selection and confirmation process and the past battles between Congress and the president.

Book: The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany

Reaction from Moscow, and a conversation with former United States National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In just the last century, we've made an astounding amount of scientific progress. And thanks to some of that progress, we can now share 10 of those discoveries with you in a video on the internet!

Human cannibalism is a lot more common than you might think. Dive into its complex history and see its uses in medicine, cultural rituals and in times of survival. -- 15th century Europeans believed they had hit upon a miracle cure: a...

French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality: r > g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). Here, he talks...

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing...

In this glimpse into our technological future, cryptographer Craig Costello discusses the world-altering potential of quantum computers, which could shatter the limits set by today's machines -- and give code breakers a master key to the...

Journalist Mustafa Akyol talks about the way that some local cultural practices (such as the seclusion of women) have become linked, in the popular mind, to the articles of faith of Islam. Has the world's general idea of the Islamic...

To ring in 2021, we want to celebrate some of the greatest minds in science — folks who have contributed to our understanding of the world and in some cases saved lives along the way!

Rates of appendicitis vary around the world, likely due to the forces of modernization.



**Appendix** - There are many other unforeseen health changes that seem to be related to the forces of...

Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist: He studies the sleep cycles of the brain. And he asks: What do we know about sleep? Not a lot, it turns out, for something we do with one-third of our lives. In this talk, Foster shares three...

The revolution that made music more marketable, more personal and easier to pirate began ... at the dawn of the 19th century. José Bowen outlines how new printing technology and an improved piano gave rise to the first music industry.

We can see the power of distributed, crowd-sourced business models every day — witness Uber, Kickstarter, Airbnb. But veteran online activist Jeremy Heimans asks: When does that kind of "new power" start to work in politics? His...

Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.