Watch & Listen

Watch: Spencer Wells takes us, as he says, on a journey that began “a long time ago [when] your family were on the brink of dying out. Yet, somehow against impossible odds they managed not only to survive but to become the most successful people on the planet.”

Watch: Is a Sense of Fairness Uniquely Human?

Watch: Lice and Human Evolution. Watch the amazing story of how the genetic history of lice gives us clues to mysteries of our own evolution.

Watch: Great Human Odyssey (PBS NOVA). Our ancient human ancestors once lived only in Africa, in tiny bands of a few thousand hunter-gatherers. Then we moved out, spreading rapidly to every corner of the planet. How did we acquire the skills, technology and talent to thrive in every environment on earth – cross the Sahara on foot, survive frigid ice ages, and sail to remote Pacific islands?

Watch: Are we born with a moral core? The Baby Lab says ‘yes’. Yale University researchers say babies are born with knowledge of right and wrong. A test with puppets shows babies preferring the “good” character most of the time.

Watch: Plato’s Cave. An animated version of Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave.

Watch: Al Khwarizmi – The father of algebra. Science in the Golden Age of Islam.

Watch: Astronomy – The Science of the Stars.

Watch: Astronomy – Mark Jacobson interview on David Letterman. Mark Jacobson presents solutions for global warming and air polution and energy price stability.

Watch: Thomas Piketty: New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century. French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality: r > g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). Here, he talks through the massive data set that led him to conclude: Economic inequality is not new, but it is getting worse, with radical possible impacts.

Watch: Perspectives on The White Man’s Burden. Four faculty members share their perspective on William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden.

Watch: Starving on the Streets. In July 2015 Nicholas Kristof travelled to South Sudan to cover the war-driven famine and the need for peace.

Watch: Coronavirus Is Our Future. Global health expert Alanna Shaikh talks about the current status of the 2019 nCov coronavirus outbreak and what this can teach us about the epidemics yet to come.

Watch: Why Bill and Melinda Gates put 20,000 Students Through College. The surest way to narrow the wealth gap is to earn a college degree. Now major universities like Princeton are working to lower the price of admission through a new kind of affirmative action, not based on race, but on low-income status.

Watch: Healthy Pleasures: The New Science of Happiness. The health benefits of sensuality, optimism and altruism.

Watch: Experts Debate Merits of PISA. Education scholars Yong Zhao and Andreas Schleicher share their divergent views on the pros and cons of OECD’s international testing program.

Watch: Will Our Kids Be Ready for the World in 2050? World Savvy founder Dana Mortenson explores how teaching and learning in the U.S. is changing, or should change, in our rapidly evolving, interconnected global society. Will our kids will be ready to compete in, and contribute to, a new reality?

Watch: The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain. Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically “teenage” behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.

Watch: The Child-Driven Education. Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

Watch: The Future of Learning. Almost twenty years of experiments with children’s education takes us through a series of startling results – children can self organise their own learning, they can achieve educational objectives on their own, can read by themselves.

Watch: So Human, So Chimp. Alan Alda explores how much of the “Human Spark” flared only since we evolved away from our non-human primate cousins, and how much was already there at the parting of the ways.

Watch: Are we born with a moral core? The Baby Lab says ‘yes’. Yale University researchers say babies are born with knowledge of right and wrong. A test with puppets shows babies preferring the “good” character most of the time.

Watch: The Social Brain and its Superpowers. Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman explains that through his studies he’s learned that our kryptonite is ignoring the importance of our social superpowers and by building on our social intuition, we can make ourselves smarter, happier, and more productive.