74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

Welcome to the September 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by P...

14 Sep 3h 52min

The course of history is affected by many things, including the political and social situations of large groups of people, their biological and physical abilities, and their geographical and environme...

7 Sep 1h 17min

Everyone lives through time, but we continue to struggle to fully understand it. We remain unsure whether time is fundamental or emergent, why it has an arrow pointing from past to future, and how tha...

31 Aug 1h 15min

Black holes, as Stephen Hawking discovered, do grow old: they emit radiation, lose mass, and eventually evaporate away. But our fascination with black holes never grows old. This is especially true to...

24 Aug 1h 5min

One of the paradoxes of science is that it seeks objectively true understanding of the world, but its methodology is driven by ignorance, failure, and uncertainty. Some phenomena we understand pretty ...

17 Aug 1h 16min

Large Language Models display an uncanny ability to construct human-sounding speech, and can synthesize concepts in novel ways. Is this because they are truly thinking like human beings in some way, o...

10 Aug 1h 51min

Welcome to the August 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patr...

3 Aug 3h 57min

People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relations...

27 Juli 1h 20min