Philosophy & Great Books

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• BBig Think2026-10-15✓ Read

  China is mass-producing slop at a scale the world has never seen

  “A 1960s American retro-futurist city street. A zombie outbreak has just erupted. The city has freshly emerged from battle, wearing the stillness that follows combat. It’s high summer, the sun directly overhead. Cold War, space-age streamlining: rounded, science-fiction domes. Chaos everywhere — wrecked vintage cars, scattered newspapers, blood on the pavement, storefronts from another decade. Zombie corpses litter the street. The leisure of the setting sits in violent contrast to the dead.”

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• BBig Think2026-10-15✓ Read

  How to become a great conversationalist

  A while back, I was at a party in London where a friend introduced me to an actress who had just been in a big theater production. I was excited to talk with her. Throughout our conversation, she asked brilliant questions, and I enjoyed answering them. She was great at making people feel seen and important. But whenever I asked her something back, with real curiosity about her life, she gave a brief, polite answer and turned the spotlight back on me: “But enough about me, tell me more about you.”

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• BBig Think2026-10-15✓ Read

  The ancient environmental archive hidden beneath a northern bog

  I need to move on and find my field plots, but pausing here has caused my feet to sink. They are now completely buried by peat; only my shins remain visible. I shift my weight from side to side and point my toes to break the suction, releasing a loud squelching retort and sending tiny bubbles to the surface.

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• BBig Think2026-10-15✓ Read

  What total darkness reveals about who you really are

  Could removing light be a key to discovering who you really are? That’s one idea behind dark retreats*, an experience that’s about as close to a complete sensory deprivation chamber as you can get. Participants spend extended periods in total darkness, stripping away the inputs and distractions of everyday life.  Andrew Holecek, an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions, believes in the transformative power of dark retreats.  Holecek says in today’s society, we’ve become “light junkies,

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• BBig Think2026-10-15✓ Read

  Current AI is not conscious

  NYU philosopher Ned Block explains why he thinks today’s AI isn’t conscious, what the hard problem still leaves unanswered, and why biology matters.

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• BBig Think2026-10-15✓ Read

  Einstein’s general relativity equations: explained in plain English

  Although Albert Einstein is a legendary figure in science for a large number of reasons — including E = mc², the photoelectric effect, and the notion that the speed of light is a constant for everyone — his most enduring discovery is also the least understood: his theory of gravitation, general relativity.

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• BBig Think2026-10-14✓ Read

  Exploring a world full of minds in Los Angeles

  After witnessing the horrors of World War I, the naturalist Henry Beston retreated to a tiny cabin on the dunes of Cape Cod in search of a peace that human civilization had shattered. There, watching the birds and creatures around him, he began to question humanity’s place in the natural world.

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• BBig Think2026-10-14✓ Read

  Before Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe imagined the Space Age

  It may be tempting to dismiss out of hand the notion that Edgar Allan Poe — popularly conceived of today as an almost mythic figure cloaked in ravens and tell-tale hearts — was the “grandfather of realistic spaceflight fiction” and had a significant effect on the conceptual development of the spacecraft. But it is no tall tale. The young orphan who walked the night-lit streets of Baltimore, the first American city with gas streetlamps, had a mind that strove to encompass not only the macabre but the entirety of the cosmos.

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• BBig Think2026-10-14✓ Read

  Naturalness: a useful principle, but not an absolute rule

  There are two classes of problems that physicists often talk about that might leave you thinking, “geez, a physicist can never be satisfied, can they?”

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