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
In one of those strange collisions between leatherbound Literature and paperless modern news, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” was read aloud at Occupy Wall Street on Friday. Not only that, but the novella is being offered by the OWS Library, and some OWS members are reviving Bartleby’s ...
The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible turns 400 this year, and while the milestone has been lavishly celebrated already, I’d like to add my toast before the party ends. In principle, a good book can always use another recommendation. Like the Beatles discography or the screenplay for ...
I’m happy to learn that a book called Why Read Moby-Dick? has just been published by Viking, although the title immediately prompts the question: why read Why Read Moby-Dick? If you’re hesitating on the brink of a plunge into Melville’s epic, do you really want 130 more pages to wade through first ...
Allen Ginsberg, you fearless old goat, you shrewd, batshit agitator, you hedonist Buddhist, where are you now? Following Occupy Wall Street in the news has made me want to invoke you, to summon you from the dead, as you did Walt Whitman in “A Supermarket in California.” Have you been watching the ...
Wikipedia is universally relied on and universally distrusted. On the one hand, it’s a stunning repository of knowledge that has rendered the World Books of my not-so-distant childhood utterly obsolete; on the other hand, it’s always partly tethered to the wisdom of crowds, meaning that diligent ...
Earlier this year, novelist Jane Smiley contributed an entertaining and provocative piece to Big Think’s “How to Think Like Shakespeare” series. In it she wrote that while composing A Thousand Acres, her 1991 Pulitzer winner, she caught a glimpse into the mind of Shakespeare—and found it less ...
Last month the Boston Red Sox dropped out of playoff contention, losing their wild-card berth to the Tampa Bay Rays after leading them by nine games three and a half weeks earlier. For any other team, this would have been a late-season swoon of epic proportions, but by Red Sox standards, it was ...
Today Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Swedish winner since 1974 and the first umlauted winner since Herta Müller in 2009. The citation mentions his "condensed, translucent images," which allow readers "fresh access to reality." It's ...
If past trends are any guide, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature will go to a post-postmodern Francophone novelist from a forgotten duchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And yet partisans of American literature continue to hold out hope that the Swedish Academy will, someday, honor one of our ...
I enjoyed this recent article by Neal Stephenson in the World Policy Journal, but I think he and his editors may have buried their lede. Stephenson, a bestselling science fiction (SF) author who grew up watching the Apollo missions, is concerned about the lack of visionary science and engineering ...
Is the frequently drawn distinction between online bookstores (efficient, convenient, innovative) and traditional bookstores (old-fashioned, communal, curated) a false one? This fall, Molly Gaudry and her fellow staff at The Lit Pub are trying to prove that it is. Billing itself as “an online ...
Here’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough in the “death of print” debate. If print books are limping toward extinction, why do so many writers—even the youngest, Web-savviest writers—still fight to publish them? Former Gawker editors have struck book deals; so have the creators of ...
The book world was saddened last week by the death of Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, at the age of 64. Project Gutenberg represented the first significant attempt to digitize literature, having been launched in 1971 when Hart typed the text of the Declaration of Independence into a ...
Guest Post by Jenna Le. Jenna Le has worked as a physician in Queens and the Bronx, New York City. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Six Rivers , was published by New York Quarterly Books in August 2011. I am a poet by night; by day, I am gainfully employed as a physician. By no means ...
In connection with 9/11, any book recommendation risks seeming trivial. Even the best writing can’t bring back the dead. Ten years after the event, the most a book can hope for is to embody a stance opposite from the one that drove those planes into those buildings. In other words, to be humane ...