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What led to the rise of the modern world? How have we made so much progress, and what are its consequences? What are humanity's best ideas? Join award-winning historian Brad Harris as he eng...
Human civilization has been trying to defeat death forever. For the first time, we may be beginning to succeed. In labs from California to C...
What makes it possible for billions of strangers to cooperate every day? Trust. Not the kind you have with friends and family. But an elabor...
Where did probability come from? In this episode, Brad Harris explores how the invention of probability reshaped humanity's relationship wit...
Why do civilizations turn against their own greatness, and what happens when they do? In this episode of Context with Brad Harris, we trace...
Once survival is secured, a different question emerges: what is life for? In this episode of Context, we trace three enduring sources of hum...
Human history is not a smooth story of progress. It is a story of bottlenecks—moments when pressure narrows the field, and when only certain...
In this episode of Context , we explore the historical, philosophical, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, drawing on examp...
Can fractured societies pull themselves back from the brink? Is America doomed to slide into another civil war? Or, are we already engaged i...
My thoughts on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and what his martyrdom reveals about truth versus lies, good versus evil, and the West's s...
For fifty years, we've been told that nature is fragile — a porcelain Eden, easily shattered by the slightest human pressure. But history te...
History is full of phantom worlds—alternative technological paradigms that could have made everything turn out radically differently. Airshi...
Modern life runs on hidden engine rooms—vast, intricate systems most of us never see. The Haber-Bosch process, which turns air into fertiliz...
The modern world is defined by acceleration. But what if the most stable—and perhaps most human—version of ourselves existed long before civ...
Why did we stop believing in utopia? By the late 19th century, many Americans had come to believe that the future would be defined by peace,...
Is it possible that war, for all its horror, once played a vital role in human flourishing—and that its disappearance has left a cultural an...
A century ago, Oswald Spengler warned that Western civilization was entering its final phase—not from war or catastrophe, but from cultural...
We often think global power is all about armies and technology. But what if the most decisive battles are fought through stories? In this ep...
This is a short preview of a supporter-only bonus episode. In this episode, I explore the psychological and philosophical reasons we keep pr...
We didn't cure boredom—we erased it. And in doing so, we may have lost one of the most quietly powerful forces in human development. In this...
The SEC was created to protect investors—but is it now protecting incumbents instead? In this episode of Context, we explore the rise of une...
In this episode, we examine Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, a chilling warning about how societies drift into tyranny—not through for...
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There's a lot that's dividing Americans right now - lots of divisive narratives that have captivated lots of people. One of those narratives...
"Notes on Nationalism" was an essay written by George Orwell in 1945, just as World War II was ending. It caused quite a stir at the time, b...
Like many others, I've begun to worry about the fate of higher education in American society. Having spent most of my professional life in a...
In this episode, I invited the philosopher and author Stephen Hicks on the podcast to chat about his book, Explaining Postmodernism . Stephe...
What's that line attributed to Mark Twain?... "History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes." As the authors Neil Howe and William St...
Plague, political upheaval, the looming prospect of another civil war... what century are we in? To retain historical perspective, and to fi...
I went slightly mad producing this episode. But then, the line between our reality and the fiction of 1984 has become far too blurry for my...
"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." Lately, it seems like our society is attempting to replace truth with power, forgetting...
It's hard to remember how intelligent humanity can be when we are relentlessly bombarded by bad news. Author and mathematician Steven Stroga...
Carl Sagan was a brilliant popularizer of science. His book, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark , helps to inspire cle...
There is an overlooked rule in history: far more is lost and forgotten than is preserved and remembered. Humanity has made incredible progre...
Today, we explore the origin of the modern concept of a fact. We take facts for granted, but they represent an invaluable intellectual techn...
Today I'm speaking with Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen , a historian from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It would be hard to find a schol...
Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind , published in 1987, became one of the most influential books of the last 50 years by instiga...
In this episode, we witness the debate that raged over the birth of what is perhaps the most powerful idea in history; the idea that support...
Niall Ferguson is one of the most influential historians of our generation. His professional effort extends well beyond academia to ensure t...
Niall Ferguson, perhaps the most famous historian of our generation, offers yet another breakthrough in his latest work, The Square and the...
Is there a logic to history? Many scholars balk at the idea of searching for such logic, insisting that each culture may only be understood...
Today, I'm speaking with Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of The Fall of Rome, and the End of Civilization . It has become fashionable to argue th...
The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow was one of the most influential lectures of the 20th century, triggering an intense epistemological debate wi...
Merchants of Doubt is not just a book about how illusions of scientific controversy have been constructed, it's also about the people who co...
If civilization collapsed, and our descendants could rediscover a single work to get humanity back on track scientifically and technological...
In this episode, we're shifting gears and I'll read an article that I published in 2013 in the journal American Scientist called "Evolution'...
The history of disease demonstrates both the accidental nature of history and the triumph of human reason that can enable us to gain some co...
In 1493 , Charles Mann shows us how Europeans emerged at the center of a modern, globalized world by establishing the Columbian Exchange; a...
Genghis Khan was so influential that, to understand how Europe began to shake off its medieval provincialism, how the Islamic world lost muc...
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a classic in the history of science, and one of the most cited books of the twentieth century. Th...
Margaret Jacob's book helps us understand how scientific knowledge became integrated into the culture of Europe through the 1600s and 1700s,...