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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been so baffled by Afghanistan or because I’m allergic to the hyperbolic use of “never” and “always” and “nothing.” Whatever the cause, I cringed when I read this headline in a British newspaper over the weekend: “Same old mistakes in new Afghan war (Soviet military archives ...
When Nigeria handed over a disputed peninsula to Cameroon last year, it looked a lot like a happy ending -- a war averted and, in the words of the United Nations secretary general, "a model for negotiated settlements of border disputes." But as a recent BBC radio broadcast showed, even a "model ...
I'm bursting with things I want to share here today. But we've got a new look and new blog names, so I want to start by explaining what to expect from a blog called Global Pedestrian. I've been lucky to walk my way through a handful of the world's great places. When I was nine, my family spent a ...
The breaking news that a car bomb has killed at least 41 people in northwest Pakistan gives renewed currency to the question Vice President Joe Biden poses in the scene that opens a new Newsweek story: "Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar ...
With all the focus on the big decisions ahead in Afghanistan, I found myself bracing for a sucker punch and wondering what, say, North Korea might be up to. Doing a quick web search just now before posting something a bit different here about the Pyongyang regime, I got my answer in headline form: ...
One day after the New York Times quoted an expert saying the Taliban's leader has "staged one of the most remarkable military comebacks in modern history," Fareed Zakaria is in today's Washington Post arguing that America's Afghanistan "mission has been largely successful for the past eight years ...
In the six days since I wrote here about the military government's deadly crackdown in Guinea, international pressure has mounted. Richard Moncrieff, the West Africa project director for International Crisis Group, says Guinea's troubles should teach the world to do a better job of preparing for ...
Intuition always tells us that we need to look closer at things that baffle us. Steve Coll's Senate testimony last Thursday is a reminder that sometimes we need to step back -- far enough back, in the case of Afghanistan, to bring India and Pakistan into our field of view. Coll, who writes for The ...
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would want you to know that what you are about to read here is "international left-wing libel" against him and his country. So take this post, the recent Freedom House report characterizing Italy's press as only "partly free," and the tens of thousands of ...
Maj. Gen. William B. Garrett III, commander of U.S. Army Africa, looked homeward last Tuesday and gave this bleak assessment of us: "Most Americans view Africa, I think, as a country, and they tend to forget that we're talking about a continent here with over 50 countries in it, hundreds of ...
This morning's National Public Radio piece about Mexico's Los Zetas drug cartel ends with a jarring quote from Tony Zavaleta, the interim provost of a Texas university that was hit by gunfire this month when a firefight between Mexican soldiers and drug traffickers sent stray bullets across the Rio ...
When President Obama scrapped plans to base parts of a missile shield in former Soviet satellite states, the simplified story line suggested America had given Russia what it wanted. Anyone who imagines that's all Russia wants should listen to the frustration in Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov's ...
In some erudite, parallel-universe version of our world, no earthlings ever form opinions about America's next invasion or diplomatic overture without scrutinizing their atlases, poring over press accounts in seven languages, and re-familiarizing themselves with the passages they underlined in ...
Bob Herbert gets it right in this morning's New York Times: "President Obama is in the uncomfortable position of staring reality in the face in Afghanistan. Reality is not blinking." The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is warning that America's mission "will likely result in failure" unless he ...
Violent, intimidating, homophobic soccer enthusiasts. Those five words would have struck us as a hilarious oxymoron back in the Illinois of my childhood, where football always meant "macho" and soccer often meant "wuss." We would have suspected a joke or a hoax if we came across the news from this ...