Book
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond · 1997
A geographic account of why some societies industrialised earlier, centred on crops, domesticable animals and continental axes.
Explore
Eight topic spaces, one shared method.
Choose a room and read what is currently being argued in it.
Philosophy
Questions that refuse to settle: meaning, ethics, mind, freedom.
312 ideas · 4,820 Sapiens
Economics
How societies produce, distribute and argue about value.
268 ideas · 3,910 Sapiens
Psychology
The architecture of attention, memory, motivation and self.
221 ideas · 3,477 Sapiens
History
What the past can and cannot tell us about the present.
197 ideas · 2,984 Sapiens
Science
Evidence, method, uncertainty, and the limits of explanation.
244 ideas · 3,620 Sapiens
AI & Technology
Machines that read, write and decide — and what that does to us.
389 ideas · 5,240 Sapiens
Society
Institutions, inequality, cities, migration, belonging.
301 ideas · 4,105 Sapiens
Human Behavior
Why people do what they do, alone and in crowds.
212 ideas · 3,188 Sapiens
World inquiries
Current events, put as propositions
Live global developments translated into the arguments underneath them.
Trending global inquiries
What the world is arguing about this week, put into propositions.
Micro-debates
Argue a motion in four rounds and let the room score the reasoning.
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Seven days, one text, a cohort checking in daily.
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Active
Discussions in progress
Sources
What people are citing
Book
Why Nations Fail
Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson · 2012
Places inclusive versus extractive political institutions, rather than geography or culture, at the centre of long-run prosperity.
Book
The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt · 1958
Distinguishes labour, work and action, and defends the public realm as the space where human plurality becomes visible.
Podcast / Lecture
Institutions, Rain and Roads — a conversation on African growth
Dr. Femi Akintola & Amara Moyo · 2026
A 74-minute exchange on whether infrastructure or institutional reform should come first in landlocked economies.
Book
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith · 1776
The founding argument that specialisation and exchange, not hoarded bullion, are the sources of a nation's wealth — read here against its own moral philosophy.
Book
Seeing Like a State
James C. Scott · 1998
How schemes to improve the human condition fail when they replace local, practical knowledge with legible administrative abstractions.
Book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1962
The account of paradigms and anomalies that reframed science as a social practice punctuated by crisis, not a smooth accumulation of facts.
Book
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
David Graeber · 2011
An anthropological history arguing that credit preceded coinage, and that debt is a moral language before it is an economic one.
Book
Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault · 1975
The birth of the prison as a model for modern institutions: power exercised through visibility, measurement and the ordinary timetable.