Big Brains

In October of 2019, Google announced their supercomputer had reached quantum supremacy. With that announcement, and as we take a short break for the holidays, we thought we should replay a prior Big B...

Every election year, poll after poll tries to predict where millennials stand politically. As we head into 2020, we'd like to replay this episode with Prof. Cathy Cohen who says some of our assumption...

It’s a simple question to ask, but seems impossible to answer: What causes one nation to succeed and another to fail? What exactly are the origins of global inequality? There are few people who have ...

Since the beginning of human history, we’ve looked up at the stars and wondered: Are we alone? No other generation has been able to find an answer, but David Charbonneau thinks we may be the first. He...

For most Americans, the driving force in their personal and public life is a desire to attain the “good life”. But what if our attachment to that desire is the very thing holding us back? Lauren Berla...

In the last decade, there has been a mass migration of people into urban areas across the globe. This rapid urbanization has been increasingly unsustainable for our cities and it’s projected to get wo...

If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Most people say they’d want to read minds. But Prof. Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business says you already have that...

It’s been a historic week, with news that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has officially opened an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. There’s no better expert to examine the recent events in...

The looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad became one of the defining moments of the second Iraq War. Christopher Woods, the director of the Oriental Institute, one of the world’s foremost ...

One of the incredible perks of making a podcast at a place like the University of Chicago is the opportunity to feature some of the incredible guests who speak on our campus.  This week, Supreme Cour...