When a new wind turbine spins up on a blustery afternoon or a vast solar array absorbs the midday summer sun, the public generally assumes that the clean electricity generated...
When the public imagines the devastating toll of war, the mind instantly summons images of shattered buildings, displaced families fleeing across borders, and the tragic arithmetic of military and civilian...
When people picture global water scarcity, the image that most often comes to mind is a cracked, sun-baked lakebed or a shrinking river winding through a parched landscape. The prevailing...
For decades, conventional economic wisdom has been anchored to a distinctly pessimistic view of human nature. The assumption is simple, yet profoundly influential: if you give people money without strict...
For more than a century, the modern business world has operated under a remarkably simple assumption. The belief is that time equals output, and therefore, a forty-hour workweek is the...
The popular imagination holds a deeply ingrained image of climate salvation centered almost entirely around endless rows of freshly planted saplings spreading across a greening Earth. Corporations, governments, and philanthropic...
Popular culture has painted a highly specific, enduring portrait of a cyberattack. We often imagine lines of green code scrolling across dark monitors, brilliant but malicious hackers brute-forcing complex algorithms,...
There is a pervasive assumption that the dirt beneath our feet is nothing more than pulverized rock, an inert and lifeless sponge waiting to be filled with chemical fertilizers. In...
When the phrase "climate migrant" enters the public discourse, a very specific and dramatic image tends to follow. It is an image dominated by international borders, crowded boats, and desperate...
For the better part of a decade, the global transition toward a completely cashless society has been celebrated as an inevitable triumph of technological progress. Consumers and policymakers alike largely...
Most people interacting with artificial intelligence picture a frictionless technology. When we ask a chatbot to write an email or generate an image, the response arrives in seconds, seemingly conjured...
Generations of children have grown up hearing the same warning from their parents that sitting too close to the television or reading a book in the dark will ruin their...
Many people believe that the global transition to renewable energy will finally usher in an era of geopolitical peace, effectively ending the resource wars that defined the twentieth century. The...
We speak of the internet in meteorological terms. We store our precious family photographs in the cloud, stream high-definition movies over the air, and download immense libraries of data from...
Society frequently pictures loneliness as an issue for the elderly. We imagine an older person living alone in a silent house. Yet, scientists are pointing to a completely different demographic....
Looking out at the ocean, it feels like a permanent, unchanging part of our world. Its waves wash over sandy beaches and crash into rocky cliffs, stretching infinitely into the...