Wait But Why

Last updated • 1 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Wait But Why
Wait But Why Logo.png
Available inEnglish, Chinese
Editor Tim Urban
URL waitbutwhy.com
Launched2013;12 years ago (2013)
Current statusOnline

Wait But Why (WBW) is a website founded by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn and written and illustrated by Urban. The site covers a range of subjects as a long-form blog. [1] Typical posts involve long-form discussions of various topics, including artificial intelligence, outer space, and procrastination, using a combination of prose and rough illustrations. [2] [3] [4]

On May 21, 2014, Urban posted "The Fermi Paradox", a post that became extremely popular. [5] [6] A 2016 Ted Talk by Urban on procrastination, based on concepts from the blog, had garnered over 74 million views by March 2025, making it the second most viewed TED Talk in history. [7] A post on the blog about Elon Musk and Neuralink was produced with involvement from Musk himself. [8]

In 2019, Marie Boran of The Irish Times summarized the website as a collection of "lengthy, thoughtful and well-written blog posts", praising them for being an "accessible and entertaining primer on human nature". [9]

References

  1. ↑ Davis, Noah (30 October 2014). "How Do You Make a Living, Email Newsletter Writer?". Pacific Standard . Retrieved 22 December 2015.
  2. ↑ Roberts, David (27 August 2015). "Tech nerds are smart. But they can't seem to get their heads around politics". Vox. Vox Media . Retrieved 4 September 2016.
  3. ↑ Grothaus, Michael (5 March 2015). "The Secrets Of Writing Smart, Long-form Articles That Go Absolutely Viral". Fast Company . Retrieved 22 December 2015.
  4. ↑ Eyal, Nir (10 August 2021). "The Behavioral Economics Diet: The Science of Killing a Bad Habit". Psychology Today . Retrieved 16 August 2021.
  5. ↑ "The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why". Wait But Why. 2014-05-21. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
  6. ↑ Klein, Ezra (2020-02-10). ""We're in the climax of a movie": Tim Urban on humanity's wild future". Vox. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
  7. ↑ Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | TED , retrieved 2023-03-01
  8. ↑ Welsh, Caitlin (17 July 2019). "Elon Musk claims robot surgeon will sew electrodes into human brains in 2020". Mashable . Retrieved 16 October 2021.
  9. ↑ Boran, Marie (17 September 2019). "Weblog: Wait But Why offers long and thought-provoking reads". The Irish Times . Retrieved 16 October 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.