2227 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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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
The Revenge of Reason - A close-up

The idea that the brain is hardware and the mind is software is a bad metaphor drawn from computers and physical devices that we're familiar with, rather than the mathematical theory of computation...

Peter Wolfendale
The Virtual Universe - In a nutshell

It connects economics, technology, and ethics, while also exploring practical implications for business functions such as marketing, human resources, and supply chain management. At the same time, it looks beyond the corporate world to broader fields such as education, healthcare, and sustainability.

Andreas Kaplan
The Devil’s Castle - The wide angle

My history holds a mirror to U.S. psychiatry over the last half decade—its promises and its perils, particularly for females. At the same time my story is used insofar as it supports the research, always...

Susanne Paola Antonetta
DeKonstructing the Kardashians - In a nutshell

My work aims to make postmodern and media theory more accessible by using the Kardashian family as the ultimate exemplar. I also aim to utilize postmodern and media theory to help explain how the Kardashians managed to make such a massive, inescapable cultural impact. Some people view my project as parasocial. Others view it as pretentious.

MJ Corey
Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant - A close-up

The metamorphosis Enver Hoxha underwent: from a materialist and pragmatist dictator who wanted to modernize his country, he became a dogmatic tyrant, blind to his people’s suffering, obsessed with pursuing at all costs ideological purity...

Artan R. Hoxha
Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome - In a nutshell

Castrati, I argue, assumed the function of a latency that haunted Moreschi and his predecessors, especially after about 1830. By then, they had departed from European opera stages and soon ended up exclusively in papal Rome. Since then, castrati have continued haunting our present..

Martha Feldman
Death in the Strike Zone - In a nutshell

Like a detective investigating a cold criminal case, to find answers I had to blow the dust off of ancient case files, open them up and look at them with new eyes. All of my witnesses are long dead, and making new discoveries about someone who died 160 years ago would seem to be unlikely – yet I managed to make a few.

Thomas W. Gilbert
Public Space as Art

I was more interested in actions and public interventions, but I use those methods less and less, since neoliberalism has found a way to appropriate dissent—at least its most superficial forms—and turn it into propaganda for its own ends as well...

Filippo Minelli
Cultural Mavericks - In a nutshell

I develop the concept of ‘culturally adapted strategy’ to explain how they creatively engage with political narratives, draw moral legitimacy, and harness cultural resources to carve out a unique identity, one that affords them an..

Zheng Liu
Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant - A close-up

I was doing research on museums, and I had this feeling that I wouldn’t be back. I like Albania, but it’s not my Albania anymore. I thought my time had passed...

Robert C. Austin
Creativity in Mathematics

Mathematics often appears fixed and timeless, yet many of its most powerful ideas—from negative numbers to infinite dimensions—are human creations born from imagination and experimentation.

Edward Scheirneman
The Nature of Nurture - A close-up

Thus, knowing how a person develops does not tell you whether nature or nurture were principally responsible because the same way...

Jay Belsky

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