Big Brains

People have been taking psychoactive drugs since the beginning of human history, but there hasn’t been a lot of good scientific study of these substances. One person who has been trying to turn a sci…

What are we going to do about police misconduct? Many are calling for a total defunding of the police, while others are looking for systems to enhance accountability through reform. Many have pointed…

There have always been, and probably always will be, conspiracy theories, but we’ve certainty seen a dramatic increase this year. Misinformation around the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic have c…

In the last few weeks, our country has been rocked by nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd, and many other black people, at the hands of police. To be true to the mission of our …

What happens to the world after a pandemic? Lots of experts have been talking about what we may be able to expect after COVID-19 from the 1918 Spanish flu and The Black Death. But, as any historian w…

Our society has always relied on leaders to effectively manage crises. But with the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging society, it’s more important than ever to understand what effective leadership should lo…

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the most profound challenges in our world. One of the most prominent has been governmental dysfunction. As director for the Center For Effective Government at t…

One of the most tragic aspects of the coronavirus outbreak has been the disproportionate effect COVID-19 has had on communities of color in cities around the country.

Assoc. Prof. Monica Peek of the …

The coronavirus outbreak has devastated many sectors of our society, and brought many of the issues we were facing before the pandemic to the forefront. This is especially true of health care.

Prof. …

Why do we feel empathy for some people, but not others? Where does this feeling of empathy come from? These questions have been the focus of one University of Chicago neurobiologist’s career. And to …

The outbreak of the coronavirus in China is a global tragedy. While much of the attention has been on the disease itself, many global experts have been focusing on the economic side-effects. Some eco…

Since its inception following World War II, the Doomsday Clock has measured our time until apocalypse in minutes. This year, for the first time, the clock set our time to midnight in just seconds. Ra…

University of Chicago alumnus Bill Browder’s story sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller—except it’s all true. He just wanted to be a businessman, but his experience as a foreign investor in R…

University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales often says that only an immigrant like himself can really appreciate American capitalism. In his native Italy, Zingales says what you know and what you …

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 …

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 assumptio…

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. H…

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 Berl…