Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His Final Interview (1996)

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Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) con­tin­ued doing what he did all along — pop­u­lar­iz­ing sci­ence and “enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly con­vey­ing the won­ders of the uni­verse to mil­lions of peo­ple on tele­vi­sion and in books.” When­ev­er Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with John­ny Car­son dur­ing the 70s and 80s, his goal was…

The Real Story of Easter: How We Got from the First Easter in the Bible to Bunnies, Eggs & Chocolate

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Pop­u­lar cul­ture has long since claimed East­er as an occa­sion for trick­ster rab­bits, dyed-egg hunts, and marsh­mal­low chicks of unnat­ur­al hues — none of which are actu­al­ly in the Bible. Though that prob­a­bly does­n’t sur­prise you, you may not be aware of just how far the mod­ern hol­i­day has drift­ed from its tex­tu­al ori­gins. In

How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome: A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals an Ancient Tax Evasion Scheme

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It was sure­ly not a coin­ci­dence that the New York Times pub­lished its sto­ry on the tri­al of a cer­tain Gadalias and Sau­los this past Mon­day, April 14th. The defen­dants, as their names sug­gest, did not live in moder­ni­ty: the papyrus doc­u­ment­ing their legal trou­bles dates to the reign of Hadri­an, around…

How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes

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You can be for­giv­en for think­ing the con­cept of “flow” was cooked up and pop­u­lar­ized by yoga teach­ers. That word gets a lot of play when one is mov­ing from Down­ward-Fac­ing Dog on through War­rior One and Two.

Actu­al­ly, flow — the state of  “effort­less effort” — was coined by Goethe,…

A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets

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The Aus­tri­an mil­i­tary engi­neer Con­rad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, con­sid­er­ing that he was work­ing on rock­ets aimed for out­er space back in the mid-six­teenth cen­tu­ry. Need­less to say, he nev­er actu­al­ly man­aged to launch any­thing into the upper atmos­phere. But you have…