We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Teaching to the process, and de-emphasizing the importance of a finished product
Last year at this time, I wrote about how happy my second-grade daughter was to be going out on field trips all week while her public elementary school administered state tests to children in the older grades. This spring, a year later, my daughter is in the building for six days of tests in ...
Amid all the cheering about the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), another high-tech, path-breaking model in higher education is being developed in San Francisco with the help of a $25 million seed grant. Minerva University, set to admit its first class of undergraduates in 2015, bills ...
Asking questions is essential to learning. That was an essential lesson from one of history's first great teachers, Socrates. Or, as the wise Rabbi Steven Greenberg puts it: "we train children at the Passover seder to ask why, because tyrants are undone and liberty is won with a good question ...
Everyone procrastinates. Sometimes it’s fun to procrastinate. Sometimes waiting until just before a deadline is very motivating. And sometimes procrastination is even necessary—as a way to put off a dreaded task until we feel more energetic, prepared, or able to do it. But sooner or later ...
I tried something new this week on the first day of my spring term humanities seminar. Rather than hand out the syllabus and introduce the themes and texts coming up, I asked my students to think back over the past few months and identify Big Ideas To Hold On To from the fall semester: concepts ...
Valentines Day is fast approaching, Praxis readers, and you don’t want to be caught without a date. With Internet romance sites catering to virtually every interest — Christian Mingle for New Testament followers (“Find God’s match for you”), Red State Date for Republicans (“Find your Running Mate ...
So, young man, you want to be Henry Rollins? You must be prepared to sacrifice everything: home, long-term relationship, children, sleep. You must be ready, every night of the year, to step on stage in a new city and perform your heart out, then go back to your hotel room (or possibly your car) and ...
What's the Big Idea? One of the unfortunate early casualties of a data-driven world is anything that can’t easily be measured. The great promise of the recent push toward the collection and analysis of “big data” is scientific reproducibility. If we collect enormous data sets on how millions ...
Several weeks into the phenomenon sparked by an essay written by former of Policy Planning for the US Department of State Anne-Marie Slaughter, we've heard that men don't have it all either; that actually, women can at least have most of it; that only the very elite still hope to have it all; that ...
What is the Big Idea? Walter Mosley is famous for his mystery and crime fiction. But there is very little mystery behind the secret to his success. First, writing takes practice. Mosley has been writing every day for the last 27 years. Then, he says, he writes without regard for acceptance or ...
What's the Big Idea? There's a lot of talk in the business-self-help sphere these days about risk and failure being essential to success. There is "fail camp." There is this book. As Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman told us recently, the thing about risk is that it's risky. The ...
“Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone/that the others have come and gone—a momentary blip/when all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,/bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel/nor see, flush against us." What's the Big Idea? It's been called "a soundtrack ...
These are heady days for my 7-year-old daughter. She won’t be sitting in her New York City public school classroom much at all this week. Instead, she and her second-grade classmates are swimming at the YMCA, visiting a Dutch farmhouse in Brooklyn, taking a field trip to South Street Seaport in ...
The world really is getting smaller. I’m a 56-year-old Jewish Baby Boomer from Manhattan who became a spiritual seeker in my early twenties. Typical of so many of my generation, I looked for Enlightenment in the East, not the West. I traveled to India in 1984, and three years later, in a brief ...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post from Robert Greenberg -- pianist, music historian, and author of How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and Heart. He is currently music historian-in-residence with San Francisco Performances and serves as the resident composer and music ...