'The Next Big Idea Daily': Feel Like a Number? Learn How to Beat the System.
In Robin Hood Math, mathematics professor Noah Giansiracusa shows how understanding a little math can help you push back against a world that keeps reducing you to a number.
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Can Rogue Archeologists Bring the Past Back to Life?
We have a pretty good idea what ancient civilizations looked like. But what did they taste, smell, and feel like?
📕 Dinner with King Tut by Sam Kean
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'The Next Big Idea Daily': Why Your Teen Thinks You're an Idiot
If you’ve raised an adolescent (or been one), you already know it’s a life stage that can feel like an emotional rollercoaster—full of drama, defiance, and slammed doors. But what if all that chaos wasn’t a bug but a feature? Today we’re hearing from Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Matt Richtel, who says adolescence is a brilliant, necessary phase of human development. In his new book How We Grow Up, Matt explains how teenage brains are wired to question, rebel, and innovate—and how that friction might just be the thing that helps our species survive.
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WHAT WE VALUE: A Neuroscientist's Guide to Making Better Choices
All day long, your brain makes subconscious value calculations. It looks at every decision and asks, "What is going to be most rewarding for me right this very minute?" That creates a gap, doesn't it? A gap between the person you want to be and the choices you actually make. Today on the show, neuroscientist Emily Falk explains the science behind that gap. She shows us how understanding our brain's hidden valuation system can give us more compassion for ourselves, and help us gently nudge our daily actions to align with our deepest values. Her new book is What We Value.
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'The Next Big Idea Daily': Take a Nap
Neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli explains how doing nothing might be the best thing you do all day. His new book is The Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life.
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The Next Big Idea is a weekly series of in-depth interviews with the world’s leading thinkers. Join hosts Rufus Griscom and Caleb Bissinger — along with our curators, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink — for conversations that might just change the way you see the world. New episodes every Thursday.