It has become fiendishly expensive to produce, and has more competition than ever. And yet the believers still believe. Why? And does the world really want a new musical about … Abraham Lincoln?! (Part one of a three-part series.)
He has been a lawyer, an instructor at the F.B.I. Academy, the owner of a frozen-yogurt chain, and a winner of the TV show Survivor. Today, Kwon works at Google, but things haven’t always come easily for him. Steve Levitt talks to Kwon about his debilitating childhood anxieties, his compulsion to choose the hardest path in life, and how Kwon used game theory to stage a victory on Survivor.
Why do so many promising solutions in education, medicine, and criminal justice fail to scale up into great policy? And can a new breed of “implementation scientists” crack the code?
There is no sludgier place in America than Washington, D.C. But there are signs of a change. We’ll hear about this progress — and ask where Elon Musk and DOGE fit in. (Part two of a two-part series.)
We reach for it twice a day — without thinking about the decades of research and engineering that went into that squeezable tube of minty goo. Zachary Crockett extracts the last bit.
Ken Goldberg is at the forefront of robotics — which means he tries to teach machines to do things humans find trivial.
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