Dec 30, 2019
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 Brains episode for you with David Awschalom, one of the world's leading quantum scientists.
Awschalom is turning what was...
Dec 16, 2019
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 assumptions about what issues matter to young people are all wrong.
Cohen’s innovative survey of millennials, GenForward, is a...
Dec 2, 2019
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 spent more time trying to answer this question than Prof. James Robinson. Robinson’ first book, Why Nations Fail, was...
Nov 18, 2019
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’s an astronomer at Harvard University and a recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Chicago...
Nov 4, 2019
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 Berlant is a theorist and English professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Cruel Optimism” a book...