There are a lot of rich and powerful people in Silicon Valley who have said some strange things about democracy.It would be easy to dismiss some of this as tech entrepreneurs doing what tech entrepreneurs have always done: dreaming about moving fast and breaking stuff, and making enormous claims about the future.But the journalist Gil Durán thinks that dismissing all of this as blather would be a mistake.In his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, Durán argues that these ideas actually belong to an emerging political ideology — one that has moved from obscure books and blogs into some of the most powerful institutions in the United States.

We tend to think that using something until it wears out is good for the planet. But what do we do if the thing we’re using up and wearing out is damaging our environment along the way? When does getting rid of something that still works become the more sustainable choice?

We all know politicians, advertisers and social media algorithms are trying to influence what we believe. But what about our own brains? How do we know when our beliefs are helping us, and when we’re instead engaged in a form of inner propaganda? And how can we use this knowledge to our advantage?

When wildfire threatens a community, what determines who makes it out safely? Emergency managers, firefighters, and weather all play critical roles, but so do the choices we make before and during an evacuation. After three decades of studying fast-moving fires, University of Utah researcher Tom Cova explains what he has learned about preparation, quick decisions, and why neighbors helping neighbors can save lives.

When we think about cancer, we tend to think about what doctors can do. But what about what patients can do? How much of that is hope? How much of it is science?

The ocean takes up roughly 70% of the planet, but we still don’t know too much about everything that is out there. Most ocean life is very small, and tends to change based on the ocean’s conditions. So even if you took a sample of ocean water right now, there’s really no guarantee that it would resemble a sample taken later.A recent study by Sarah Tucker and her team offers some direction for filling in that gap.

Twenty years ago, Richard Louv helped us begin to think differently about childhood and nature.Now, he's asking a related but perhaps even more provocative question: what happens when we really notice the world around us? What do we experience in terms of attention, awe, loss, and what it means to love a very complex world?

It’s a question psychologists have been wrestling with for decades: What exactly is time?Not the time kept by clocks or calendars, but the time we actually experience. Why do some moments stretch and others collapse?Martin Wiener has spent much of his career trying to understand those questions. His work suggests that our experience of time is not fixed at all. Instead, it may be something the brain continuously constructs and reshapes according to the information it decides is worth remembering.

For years, comedy thrived on cynicism. The world was a mess, people were selfish, and anyone who believed otherwise was the punchline.But from Ted Lasso, to Paddington, to Come From Away, some of our most beloved stories are finding humor, heart, and even heroism in empathy, earnestness, and human decency.This summer, Lyric Repertory Company is producing Gutenberg! The Musical! It’s a delightfully ridiculous show about two aspiring theater makers who are convinced they have created a masterpiece. They haven't, but their unwavering enthusiasm is part of what makes the show so charming.And it's not the only production in Lyric's season that seems interested in the power of human decency.

In the United States, we tend to celebrate people who pick a destination, set a goal, believe in themselves, and refuse to quit until they get exactly where they always knew they’d be.But real life is messier than that. Dreams change. and sometimes careers stall — we get relegated to something less than what we dreamed of.That's what happened to Todd Smith, a part-time sports writer and full-time landscape supplier.Then he found himself watching an English football match between a billion-dollar giant and a club that most people, even in England, have never heard of, and he fell down a rabbit hole.