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.
Books, covered and uncovered
The title of the Wall Street Journal's recent article on enhanced e-books—"Blowing Up the Book"—strikes me as an appropriate blend of the exciting and the ominous. (See also: "Kindle Fire.") The format is a wide-open field of creative possibilities with one or two landmines waiting underneath ...
Five years ago this June, Cormac McCarthy appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show . Given McCarthy’s legendary reticence (he had done only one major interview in the past, with the New York Times in 1992) and exalted literary stature (he has won every major American book award; Harold Bloom has called ...
Bravo to Janaka Stucky, whose new article in Poetry on struggling independent bookstores is both the most sensible and inspiring thing I’ve read on the subject. Stucky concedes what everyone in the industry knows, that a price war with Amazon is one small bookstores cannot win. Reasoning that these ...
It was a dark and stormy night. By starting A Wrinkle in Time with the most famous “bad” opening in literary history—the same Edward Bulwer-Lytton line later adopted by Snoopy—Madeleine L’Engle was practically daring critics to doubt her. Even fifty years after its first publication, Wrinkle, a ...
I like the idea of "literary New Year's resolutions" suggested by Ruth Franklin in The New Republic, and I've decided to hop on the bandwagon. But while Franklin's resolutions primarily concern general reading habits, I'd like to be more specific: I propose that 2012 be the year we all read the one ...
I’d be remiss if I let 2011 slip by without a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), who was born a century ago and who now looms larger over contemporary poetry than any other writer of her generation. That’s saying something, considering that her generation also included Robert Lowell, John ...
“Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” —A Charlie Brown Christmas Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you. But the answer involves a little textual analysis. After all, where does Christmas come from, if not books? I don’t mean the rituals of the holiday, most of which are ...
As the kind of writer who keeps his finger squarely on the cultural pulse, I’ve just watched the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” for the first time and would like to share some reactions. To summarize for those who are further behind the times than I am: Nora Ephron’s ...
In his final piece in Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) confronted the writer’s nightmare: I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the ...
Once again the Literary Review has announced the winner of its annual Bad Sex in Literature Awards, and once again I’m left strangely unsatisfied. What began as a novel exploration of a special kind of bad prose has become repetitive, tame, even exhausting. After a while all bad sex scenes sound ...
Since March of this year, a series of extraordinary paper sculptures has appeared in various locations around Edinburgh, Scotland. Each location is a library or other institution devoted to the preservation of the arts; each sculpture is accompanied by a handwritten note celebrating that same cause ...
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is drawing to a close, and with it the brave and caffeine-addled efforts of over 200,000 writers worldwide. Unabashedly privileging "enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft"—that is, "quantity over quality"—the event challenges participants to ...
I’m eager to join in the “Which five books on a desert island?” game suggested by Big Think editor Dan Honan in a recent post. As a blogger, would-be critic, and all-around neurotic, compulsive listmaking is my bread and butter. 1. Collected Works, William Shakespeare Be not afeard; the ...
“What is so distasteful about the Homeric gods,” W. H. Auden complains in his essay “The Frivolous & the Earnest,” is that they are well aware of human suffering but refuse to take it seriously. They take the lives of men as frivolously as their own; they meddle with the former for fun, and then ...
Virginia Woolf once wrote that “human character changed on or around December, 1910.” It’s a deliberately cryptic remark, but she was referring broadly to the wave of cultural modernism that blasted the complacent world of late nineteenth-century Europe into the fractured cosmos of Freud, Einstein ...