Videos

Novelist and “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel explains how travel confronts you with facts you cannot ignore and suggests that multilingualism makes us richer individuals.

Chosen as host long before the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, Chris Rock’s prominent presence at the Academy Awards risks appearing as compensation for inequality in Hollywood.

Today’s video is part of a series on female genius, in proud collaboration with 92Y’s 7 Days of Genius Festival.

Philosophy is a worthwhile endeavor, says Bill Nye the Science Guy, though the answers it offers are frequently limited by human rationality. Science, on the other hand, surprises us!

Comics are free to write jokes about whatever they want and, if they’ve done their homework, any topic can be made funny. Political correctness discourages lazy joke writing, says comic Paul F. Tompkins.

The real problem with bypassing the iPhone’s security features is bigger than violating the privacy rights of Americans. It’s coming to terms with how governments around the world would react.

The disenfranchisement of convicted felons has altered the outcome of governors races, key senate races, and even presidential elections, says political science professor Marie Gottschalk.

Named by The New York Times as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court, Cory Booker points out that strict constitutionalists should want a new appointee put forward before too long.

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders: The biology of their brains is different from one another, which shows in their speech, behavior, and in who their supporters are.

Bill Nye the Science Guy tackles the perennially challenging topic of time travel. Whether we can ultimately travel through time may depend on the speed of our yet-to-be-invented time machine.

Assessment in the form of standardized tests isn’t wrong on its face, says Howard Gardner, creator of the multiple intelligences theory. But when we measure only one kind of intelligence, that is a problem.

Make personal connections more meaningful with people you already know and care about, and deepen your relationship with others who you’re just getting to know.

We all want to have a good, stable relationship with somebody, says Dr. Helen Fisher. So it’s important to understand how intense romantic love affects our long-term goals.

When Copernicus put the sun at the center of the solar system in 1543 instead of the Earth, it dealt a major blow to the self-esteem of people who needed to be at the center of it all.

Psychological researcher Suzanne Hidi discusses what separates individuals who have mere curiosity in life from those who, through taking a deeper interest, are propelled onto new discoveries.

When Siri helped a young criminal nearly get away with murder, future crimes expert Marc Goodman realized how algorithms had become co-conspirators in a new age of digital crime.

The positing of universes parallel to ours, to explain the behavior of quantum mechanics, may seem like the weirdest idea ever. But it might be just the second-weirdest idea ever.

When Mike asks Bill Nye the Science Guy if asking too many questions is really a thing, Nye responds with a surprising answer.

Dr. James Doty gives a practical approach to taming your mind, opening your heart, and reclaiming life’s most difficult experiences for yourself. It’s a how-to guide and a why-to guide.

Which team you support tells others about your background and where your history lies. And the superstitions we obey in support of our team are a classic example of tribal loyalty.

Two places in society should not be run by corporate-minded individuals: health care and government. The for-profit model fails to provide proper services or fairness, says the former Minnesota governor.

Expanding our moral sphere to include animals isn’t just good for animals. Professional skeptic Michael Shermer explains the various ways that it’s also good for us.

A new generation of humanoid robots are coming in the 2020s, says innovation and industry expert Alec Ross. They will care for our aging populations and revolutionize manufacturing.

Whether it’s bacteria or consciousness itself, science and philosophy examine a specific object that stands apart from the observer. Art is more collaborative, says Alva Noë. It changes us as we change it.

Elijah Bender, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, asks Bill Nye if our nostalgia for classic muscle cars will soon be a thing of the past.

The essence of comedy is being critical, says John Cleese, and that means causing offense sometimes. But we shouldn’t protect everyone from experiencing negative emotions by enforcing political correctness.

Our mobile devices provide so much stimulation that they capture our entire attention, even when we’re with other people in social situations. Smartphones isolate us; ironically, they rob us of true solitude.

To describe humans as innately selfish creatures (a) misunderstands some of our most important scientific and evolutionary theories and (b) is empirically false. A person’s first impulse is generally toward generosity, not meanness.

When presidential debates become a media circus, it’s the voters who lose. But an alternative debate format would eliminate the kind of candidate-moderator feud that is dominating our political moment.

For most of his adult life, George Takei had to hide his sexuality to protect his career as an actor. He came out when he was 68 years old and, contrary to his fears, his work and his life have since blossomed.