7 years ago or so I got really into listening to university lectures that have been made available online. These are all full courses, so a huge time commitment, but for a while I really enjoyed listening to a lecture every night before I went to sleep. Turning of the lights, closing my eyes and just having a nice relaxing time, while also learning stuff. I haven’t listened to as many recently though. In general one obviously doesn’t learn as well by just passively listening through a series of courses as actually engaging with material, but for a lot of topics it can give a nice overview in addition to being a pleasant way to spend some time.
Ecological economics in a historical context, https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_596648014:
This series of lectures is really good, both as an introduction to ecological economics and some heterodox economics in general. Good discussions on the relation between institutional economics and more mathematical economics, the issue of robustness vs specificity in mathematical models of the economy, the difference between ecological economics and environmental economics etc. A lot of really interesting history about the development of economics as a field and how it has been thought of in relation to ecology at various point in history as well. In general it is an overview which is accessible to people with no technical background in mathematics in my estimation, although it discusses some technical aspects, but it is abstracted enough that I think it is still useful for people who don’t care about the nitty gritty. Of the things I mention in this post this is what I most highly recommend due to its importance with respect to current events and policy.
I find deep-dives into religions and religious texts that take the historical context into account fascinating. https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145 is a thorough exploration of the Hebrew Bible, going through how the text itself is synthesized from various sources, how these sources can be distinguished in the text and how texts were interpreted at the time of compilation and later. It also discusses the historical context and compares and contrasts the religious concepts espoused in the Hebrew bible with other contemporary religions and myths. https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152 similarly gives an interesting account of the context in which the texts we now know as the new testament were written, how many of them were related to specific debates within the early christian community (such as the question of non-Jewish believers) etc.
I am not personally religious, but just in case people think this is some boring debunking of religion it really isn’t and indeed much of the research uncovering the sources of “the bible”, the context etc. were done by theologians in the first place and it is still actively studied at religious institutions in addition to secular ones. I mean obviously for textual fundamentalists it can be problematic…
In general I find the topic of how a relatively small Jewish cult became a world-wide religion fascinating, a complimentary lectures series is https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-210 which as the title implies is about European history from 284-1000, one of the topics covered is how Christianity came to be the dominant religion in the Roman empire.
Also, I found this lecture series (https://web.archive.org/web/20100715064117/http://www.extension.harvard.edu/openlearning/hist1825) to be a pretty good overview of Chinese history for something a bit different from all the European/middle-Eastern stuff I mentioned above. It has been a long time since I listened to it though.
As you can see I have linked to multiple Open Yale Courses, I have listened to more stuff from there as well that I quite enjoyed, I would recommend looking through their listed courses, a lot of interesting stuff in there!