Join Jon Evans, founding director of the GitHub Archive Program, software engineer and sci-fi novelist, for an enlightening talk on the cultural history of AI doom. Over the last year, fears of an AI apocalypse have spread from Twitter's weirder fringes to The Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal, publications not exactly known for doomsaying…
Join Siena Chiang for a discussion with Mattie Kahn about her book, Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions, which recounts one of the most foundational and underappreciated forces in moments of revolution in America: teenage girls. Nine months before Rosa Parks kicked off the bus boycotts, Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing…
In the first salon of the series hosted by Alex Criddle, we'll go back in time to the origins of communication and the gradual development of complex linguistic systems, how language played an instrumental role in shaping human cognition, social structures, and cultural evolution. Linguistic breakthroughs enabled Homo sapiens to develop a complex system for…
Join us for a conversation with politician and author Bruno Maçães, on the end of our brief break from history and what comes next! Hosted by Interintellect host Bronwyn Williams.…
Tyler Cowen, Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and faculty director of the Mercatus Center, joins host Alaka Halder to discuss his exciting new generative book…
Join Dr. Jason Rheins, a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, for a salon on who Socrates (469-399 BCE) was, and what he can mean for us today. Socrates. The Oracle at Delphi proclaimed him the wisest of the Greeks, yet he supposedly claimed to know nothing but his own ignorance. He was poor…
Join Yale History professor Carlos Eire and theologian-novelist Tara Isabella Burton for a conversation on Eire's new book They Flew: a history of the paranormal and inexplicable in the early modern world, and what it can tell us about our current age of "weirdness" against a backdrop of seeming secularism. The early modern era was a…
Join philosophy student Arkadiusz Synowczyk to explore what pseudoscience is and how to recognize it, all with reference to astrology, alchemy, and magic in the ancient world. This salon is the first episode in a series on the nature of science – its power, limits, and the potential dangers it poses. Very often, claims about…
Why do people from different cultural backgrounds behave and think differently – if at all? A historical and philosophical lens. My name is Dhruv Ghulati and I am an AI entrepreneur and work in technology. I have lived in Hong Kong, Thailand, Qatar, across the Indian subcontinent, London and the Netherlands. You can find some…
POLITICO National Security Reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Alexander Ward joins veteran writer and technologist Sean Patrick Hughes for a conversation on America's global future based on rigorous reporting and sources from within Biden's White House as they worked to reposition America's international reputation. In the wake of the Trump administration's turn away from America's…
Join philosophy student Arkadiusz Synowczyk to explore the topic of objectivity of scientific knowledge, skepticism, and relativism! This salon is the first episode in a series on the nature of science – its power, limits, and the potential dangers it poses. Debates about the possibility of objective knowledge are relevant not only to the ivory tower. Societies…
Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. But how did Wilde, who died over a decade before the first feature film, help to make the movies? Join Kate Hext, associate professor of English literature at the University of Exeter and author of the new book Wilde in the Dream Factory:…
