The Best Articles in Society
The most useful articles and videos in Society from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
Top 5 Society Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Society by Refind users in 2024 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
CLARITY Is POWER: Yuval Noah Harari
Ultra-athlete Rich Roll talks with bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari about the most pressing issues currently facing mankind. For more, go here👉🏾http://...
Eric Weinstein - Why Can No One Agree On The Truth Anymore? (4K)
Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, economist, managing director of Thiel Capital and a podcaster.The last 3 years has been a time of massive confusion. No on...
Why Do So Many People Not Want To Have Children?
Malcolm Collins is a pronatalist, Stanford MBA graduate, venture capitalist and an author.What would the world actually look like if only the global populati...
Can society turn down damaging levels of light pollution?
Artificial light is proving to be an ever-growing threat to biodiversity. It's harmful to pollinating insects, bats and a host of other creatures, including ...
Hannah Ritchie: Are we the last generation
The word "sustainability" gets thrown around a lot these days. But what does it actually mean for humanity to be sustainable? Environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie digs into the numbers behind…
How to ...?
How to Build Public Spaces for Teen Girls
Teen girls have unique needs and experiences that are often left out of our built environment. Explore three projects across the world as they share how they are transforming public spaces for teen…
How to Approach Strangers at A Party
A party at the house of a friend, eleven o’clock, on a still-warm evening. A metre away from you, a group of people are chatting animatedly. Someone is telling an anecdote, it might be something about…
How to Protect Species and Save the Planet—at Once
A major new report calls on humanity to tackle the biodiversity and climate crises simultaneously. Here's what that might look like.
«HUMANITY IS STRUGGLING to contain two compounding crises: skyrocketing global temperatures and plummeting biodiversity. But people tend to tackle each problem on its own»
How to fight racism using science
Misguided assumptions about race are going mainstream, but hard facts can help you combat entrenched attitudes
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Society on Refind.
Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones Rewired Childhood. Here’s How to Fix It.
Phones have made kids sedentary, solitary, anxious, and depressed. But, says the author and psychologist, we can reverse the damage.
Why loneliness is bad for your health
A lack of social interaction is linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia and more. Researchers are unpicking how the brain mediates these effects.
We Don't Need 'Self-Help,' We Need Support
What we can learn from Denmark, home to some of the happiest people on Earth
Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation
Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations?
The achievement society is burning us out, we need more play
This is about more than a self-help switch – it will take structural changes to reject capitalism’s productivity obsession
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Society—all under 10 minutes.
The "blind spot" in science that's fueling a crisis of meaning
Adapted from The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. Published by The MIT Press. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.Our…
Have we created a society that's too complex to survive?
Homo sapiens evolved as a separate species about 300,000 years ago. Measured in generations (with each generation lasting 20 years), that means there are about 15,000 great-great-etc. grandparents…
A very short history of the F-word
The oldest unambiguous use of the F-word comes from De Officiis, a treatise on moral conduct by Cicero. No, the Roman philosopher didn’t gift English its soon-to-be favorite obscenity. Rather, in…
«For instance, the word didn’t appear in an English-language dictionary until 1966 when The Penguin Dictionary broke the taboo.»
The State of the Culture, 2024
Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)
Argentina: the therapy capital of the world
Buenos Aires natives go hungry to pay for psychoanalysis, amid growing instability, anxiety – and societal acceptance
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Society.
A Manual for Adversity
Nearly 2,000 years after it was written, Marcus Aurelius’s "Meditations" is rediscovered by each succeeding generation.
Everyone is on their phones. But is it really phone addiction we’re experiencing?
There is no standard diagnosis for ‘phone addiction’, and a debate rages about whether there should be. But will medicalizing a behavior help or harm those suffering from it?
«In its simplest form, addiction is the tipping point at which compulsion turns into dependency,»
66 Good News Stories You Didn't Hear About in 2023
A lot of things went right this year. Almost none of them made the news.
Podcasts
On the go? Listen to these Podcasts and audio in Society.
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Society, including:
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How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
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- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
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- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Society?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Society, including zeynep tufekci, Ida Bae Wells, danah boyd, WIRED, World Economic Forum.
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Keep Learning
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