2227 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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Mathematics and Creativity - A close-up

Math is still being made. This thread pushes back against the idea that mathematics is a closed body of old knowledge, showing instead how new work is constantly emerging—and how badly our classrooms fail to convey the subject’s vitality, reach, and inventiveness.

Paulina Rowińska
Ultrafinitism

The belief that both the physical and the mathematical universes are finite. Of course, they are enourmously large, but still finite. The so-called infinity is completely unnecessary, and is due to a superstitious belief in something transcendental, analogous to the belief in God.

Doron Zeilberger
Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic - In a nutshell

What did ordinary people think when confronted with a house shaped like a cube? How did city dwellers feel, a century ago, surrounded by forests of skyscrapers? What relationship existed between the human body — especially the female body, so often confined to domestic space during the twentieth century — and architecture itself?

Gabriele Neri
Why Start-Ups Fail - The wide angle

There is a temptation to think that what startups need most is a sense of wonder — the ability to wander in the mind, to think about things other people thought were impossible. But I think it's actually the opposite problem that brings most of them down. Startups fail more often because of lack of focus. Too much wandering. Generally, you need to focus.

Bernie Bulkin
A Little More Social - The wide angle

It supports this idea that our sense of worth comes from our beliefs about others. When self-esteem is low, when we're not feeling good about ourselves, that's our body's and mind's way of signaling to us that things aren't going great in our relationships. It's an alarm...

Nick Epley
The Ultraview Effect - A close-up

He began to realize -- based on vision, not just imagination -- just how many stars there were, a number too large for his brain to adequately process. In that moment, he realized that the universe was far bigger than he had ever understood and became certain that there was other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Deana L. Weibel
Moonment - The wide angle

Instead of forcing material into a fixed form, I began asking a different question: what if sculpture could move and respond to the world around it? That question gradually evolved into Moonment. Over time, the project expanded into a series of site-specific installations in different cities, each responding to its environment while remaining connected to the larger idea of shared time and perception.

Sizhu Li
Declaration - A close-up

The genius is to realize that America was born out of this idea of free will and self-actualization—the notion that you can be whatever you want...

Robert P. Watson
Marked by Time - The wide angle

History, in other words, is baked into criminal records. In this case, it generates a systematic gap between actual and predicted arrest patterns across birth cohorts. This bias appears in all major racial groups and among youth who were arrested as juveniles, so it is not the usual form of bias we worry about. It also shows up for both absolute and relative risk. A prediction tool can correctly rank who is riskier ...

Robert J. Sampson
The Friend Machine - In a nutshell

I found that synthetic intimacy is not emerging in a vacuum; it is meeting a real, unmet need, or perhaps more cynically speaking, entering and widening a wound that was already there, exacerbated by elements like the loneliness epidemic. That is why it is so powerful, and also why it is so complicated.

Victoria Hetherington
Seeing Is Not Immediate

I’m interested in how those frameworks can be made visible through form. Each decision of proportion, alignment, interval and edge is intentional. The aim isn’t to complicate the image, but to make its internal structure legible over time – revealed. What I’d want a reader to notice first is that sense of intention. The work doesn’t resolve all at once; it unfolds as relationships begin to register.

Lee Albert Hill
The Cries of Evil Times

The first encounter with this painting may not be beautiful in an aesthetic sense, but it is true to my feeling. I have always believed that humanity is capable of peace, and peace is the opposite of everything that is depicted here...

Agron Bytyçi
A Little More Social - In a nutshell

Another big reason is that people underestimate how positively the other person will respond when we reach out to connect with them. People are reluctant to engage a stranger in conversation. If they think the other person doesn't want to talk to them, they often underestimate how interested the other person is in talking to them. We're reluctant to engage in deep conversation ...

Nick Epley
King PONG - In a nutshell

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

Raiford Guins
Freedom Round the Globe - In a nutshell

When street protests prompt controversy and violence, a complex and colorful history of global resistance to tyranny has much to teach us. We see how ordinary people—from enslaved pregnant women to suffering soldiers to Indigenous grandmothers—navigated extraordinary, conflict-ridden times. We learn about quiet acts of resistance,

Sarah M.S. Pearsall
Bicentennial - In a nutshell

First, it offers new historical perspectives on the 1970s, treating the bicentennial as one of the decade’s most significant events and arguing that the decade has been misrepresented as a mere interlude between the liberal 1960s and the conservative 1980s. Instead we see the bicentennial as a critical moment in a ...

Marc Stein
Why Q Needs U - A close-up

This single letter so nicely demonstrates the development of the alphabet, through both its enduring similarities and later differences with its bovine prototype. The letter A has lost much of the complexity...

Danny Bate
Mathematics vs Arithmetic - A close-up

Arithmetic may be the foundation, but it is not the heart of mathematics. This thread examines the difference—and why proof and reasoning matter so much.

Edward Scheirneman
Film Diplomacy - In a nutshell

This history comes into focus when we take both the films and their audiences seriously. Educational films were not marginal relics, and viewers were not passive recipients. Sponsors, translators, censors, researchers, projectionists, and audiences all shaped meaning. Viewers did not simply take what institutions gave them.

Ayşehan Jülide Etem
The Ultraview Effect - In a nutshell

What we tend to underestimate, though, is the importance of spirituality or religious belief in human life. As an anthropologist of religion, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how religion provides a lens for understanding everything from politics to food to gender roles to economics.

Deana L. Weibel
Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See - A close-up

There’s something so powerful about artists who are simply willing to be artists, to create to create, without [a demand for social presence]. To put their world out there and let us sink into it...

Anthony Gomez III
Moonment - In a nutshell

There is a line from the Chinese poet Zhang Jiuling that has always stayed with me: “A bright moon rises above the sea; though far apart, we share this moment.” That idea of sharing the same moment across distance is central to the project.

Sizhu Li
Experiencing Reality - A close-up

In that sense, the dunes of the north coast remain my quiet collaborators; endlessly reshaping the ground beneath my feet and reminding me that the role of design is not to escape reality, but to help us experience it more deeply.

Rory Noble-Turner
Marked by Time - In a nutshell

Most research on children’s development follows a group of people born around the same time—a single birth cohort. But as children grow up, the world around them is also changing. Individual development and social change are intertwined; you cannot really understand one without the other.

Robert J. Sampson
How Film Became History - A close-up

In good Marxist fashion, two dialectical forces squared off: the Stalinists, who supported the Soviet regime with the fervor of religious zealots, and the Trotskyites, who looked upon Stalin’s dictatorship as a betrayal of the true faith. In the USSR, the suppression of the one by the other

Thomas Doherty
Mapmatics - In a nutshell

Many people are aware that if you look at a graph, maybe you should consider what's in this graph. Well, maps, I think, we take for granted. When we use the word ‘manipulate,’ people often think it's some bad person trying to manipulate what we think, which absolutely happens with maps. But there's also the point that we cannot show everything.

Paulina Rowińska
The Apothecary’s Wife - A close-up

It shows that medical history is inextricably entwined with social history, and that history depends as much on words as on events...

Karen Bloom Gevirtz
War Became Visual Memory

Over time, my art and my creative consciousness have developed in parallel, growing together and responding to historical, social, and spiritual circumstances.

Agron Bytyçi
The Last Titans - A close-up

National greatness is always a bit of a fairy tale. Sometimes it's necessary, but you're unwise if you completely buy into it. These are very strange and exciting lives...

Richard Vinen
Declaration - The wide angle

Franklin understood the Declaration was not just for the American people of that time. Because of the hypocrisy and the long way we had to go, it was an aspirational gift to humanity...

Robert P. Watson

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