Explained in under 10 minutes

<p><br></p><p>It's 1811, and a group of English textile workers are smashing factory machines. The Luddites were terrified these machines would destroy their livelihoods. Lewis opens there — and adds: they were...

<p>9,000 years ago, people in Jiahu, China were deliberately fermenting rice, honey, and fruit into alcohol. Emma opens there — and Lewis immediately notes: when archaeologists find the earliest evidence of human...

<p>Lewis confesses he used the word "algorithm" three times in clinic last week and isn't entirely sure he was using it correctly. Emma's answer disarms immediately: at its most basic, an algorithm is just a set of...

<p>In 1959, Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara ignore baby dolls and play instead with paper cutout adult figures — imagining futures for them. So Ruth designed a doll with an adult body, adult clothes, and adult...

<p>In 1923, Weimar Germany, prices were doubling every three days. People carried money in wheelbarrows — not because they were rich, but because that's what a loaf of bread cost. Neev opens there, before Lewis traces...

<p>Darwin spent twenty years sitting on his theory before he dared publish. He knew what it would mean. Emma opens there — the Beagle voyage, the Galapagos finches, the twenty years of turning evidence over in private —...

<p>Lewis opens with the device you're probably listening on right now: billions of tiny switches flipping on and off, millions of times per second, somehow producing music, spreadsheets, and this conversation. The...

<p>13.8 billion years ago, everything that exists — all matter, all energy, space itself — was compressed into a volume smaller than a proton. Then it began expanding. Neev opens there, and Lewis immediately stops her...

<p>You carry it everywhere. You check it within minutes of waking. It knows where you are, recognises your face, and connects you to every piece of human knowledge ever recorded. But how does it actually...

<p>At its height, one in four people alive on Earth lived under Roman rule. The roads they built are still visible from satellites. The legal principles they codified still underpin courts on every continent. How did a...

<p>It has sold over 300 million copies. It has no story, no objective, no end. And it might be the most important piece of software ever written for children.</p><p><br></p><p>Lewis opens with the origin story: Markus...

<p>You're using it right now to read these words. It's generating your reaction to them. It is, by any measure, the most complex object in the known universe — and we still don't fully understand how it...

<p>A thousand dollars invested in an index fund in 1990 would be worth around thirty thousand dollars today. Without doing anything particularly clever. So how does the stock market actually work — and why does it...

<p>The planet is warming. The science on that is settled. But how does it actually work — and why is it so hard to stop?</p><p><br></p><p>Emma starts with the greenhouse effect itself: not a modern invention, but the...

<p>Nothing can escape them. Not matter, not light, not information. And yet we know they exist — because we can see what happens to everything around them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Emma opens with the basic physics: what a...