How do you develop a healthy sense of self when the society into which you’re born has been constructed to deny your very identity? This is America’s inconvenient truth, the unwanted legacy of the Peculiar Institution, and the fly in the buttermilk of every Utopian American myth and storyline since our founding. And throughout our […]
Read More »Blog
The Science of Feedback Loops
Our world is made of circles: Living and dying. Energy and entropy. Cause and effect. Why, then, do we so often see straight lines? According to systems theorist Peter Senge, “one of the reasons for this fragmentation in our thinking stems from our language. Language shapes perception. What we see depends on what we are […]
Read More »The Science of a Murmuration of Starlings
What words can do justice to the magic of a million birds, flying and weaving as one? Improvisatory choreography? Elegant chaos? Symphonic cacophony?
There is no familiar way to make sense of this natural phenomenon — both what starlings do and how they make us feel when we see them. Yet the flocking behavior of the birds the ancient Romans believed foretold the will of the Gods — indeed, the word auspicious comes from the Latin auspicium, or “divination by observing the flight of birds” — is a natural manifestation of a set of principles for organizing complex behavior, and an observable phenomenon that runs counter to the way we human beings have made sense of the world for as long as anyone can remember.
Read More »The Science of Honeybee Democracy
There may be no creature on earth more vital to our own well-being than the honeybee — the primary pollinator for fifty different fruit and vegetable crops that make up the most nutritious portion of our daily diet.
Less debatable, however, is whether this same bee is also the ideal model for our ongoing efforts to craft a more perfect union — or at least Shakespeare thought so, when he described honeybees as the “creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”
But why? And how?
Read More »The Science of Spirals
A seashell and a beaver’s tooth.
The Milky Way and the Double Helix.
A hurricane and a human finger.
The Parthenon and the Pyramids.
Or the dive path of a peregrine falcon and the propulsive power of the human heart.
All are naturally occurring designs, from the macrocosm to the microcosm. And all are based on the same universal form and formula — the ratio of 1.618 — that has been called everything from the Golden Section to Nature’s Secret Code to the language of God itself.
Read More »We’re making a TV show — and this is our first series trailer
The world is changing. How can we make it better? This is Better World — coming in 2020.
Read More »A new film about what saves us
What saves us? What connects us? And what is it that allows people to feel like they belong to something (and/or someone) larger than themselves? Our newest film for 180 Studio, “Nuestra,” tells the story of how a father’s tragic loss — the death of his teenage daughter — leads to the birth of a […]
Read More »Why do we have 180 days of school?
School’s out for summer again. Why is that, exactly? The answer is in our newest #AskWhy video — and it might surprise you.
Read More »WHY DO WE STILL TREAT EDUCATION LIKE IT’S 1906?
Why do we still use a 19th-century invention— The Carnegie Unit—to determine if our kids are ready to graduate in 2019? Also, what the heck is a Carnegie Unit? Watch the latest video in our #AskWhy series — a series that has now been viewed by more than ten million of you — to find […]
Read More »Diverse by Design: Episode 3 (Never Teach Alone)
Powerful learning is a relational act; it never occurs alone. Why, then, do we expect our teacher to hone their craft in isolation? In episode 3 of the four-part series, Diverse by Design, we meet two of Crosstown High’s inaugural class of teachers, and learn why they believe that co-teaching is the only way to […]
Read More »
Recent Comments