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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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Radical ideas from serious thinkers
Polygamy is alive and well in parts of America. According to researchers at Brigham Young University, there are 30,000 to 50,000 people currently living a polygamist lifestyle in the United States, many of them in sects that splintered from the mainstream Mormon church when it renounced polygamy in ...
Yale professor David Gelernter tells Big Think that America should acknowledge its identity as a Judeo-Christian society and mandate teaching of the Bible in our public schools. America is a pluralistic society, but the “humane and liberating power of the American idea” which allows for ...
What would you do to give your child a head-start in life? If you’re one of the millions of so-called “helicopter parents” we discussed previously in our series, the answer is “a lot.” From macrobiotic baby food to Mandarin lessons, parents are spending more and more money and time to mold their ...
There are few things we take more for granted than the concept of gravity. Through history, physicists like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein have developed theories about the Universe that depended on the idea that objects large and small are naturally attracted to one another in space—keeping our ...
Ohio State University law professor Douglas A. Berman says everyone affected by society's laws ought to have a right to vote—even if they have to mail in their ballot from the big house. There are currently 2.3 million disenfranchised inmates in the United States: 1.5 million are serving prison ...
When psychologist Judith Rich Harris wrote in 1998 that "parents have no power, in the long run, to shape their children’s personalities," she was attacked from all sides by the scientific community and the media. Why should this statement invoke such ire? It might have to do with the fact that ...
While over $300 billion worth of prescription drugs were sold in the U.S. in 2009, the pharmaceutical industry is now bringing fewer new drugs to market each year now than it did in the mid-'90s. Patents for a handful of the most lucrative drugs, such as Lipitor and Plavix, are slated to expire ...
Could recycling actually be hurting the environment? In a recent policy paper, "Recycling Myths Revisited", Professor Daniel K. Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Mont., argues that U.S. municipal curbside recycling programs waste resources ...
Despite our puritanical roots, Americans are just as sexually liberated as Europeans, if not more so, according to recent studies. Americans tend to lose their virginity at the same age as Germans and Swiss, and, surprisingly, at a younger age than the French. U.S. rates of teen sex, pregnancy, and ...
The word “eugenics” invariably calls one thing to mind: the efforts of the Nazi party to purify the Aryan race of “undesirable traits” during the Holocaust. These horrific events remain among mankind's darkest moments. Yet in recent years, a group of bioethicists have begun to reclaim this term ...
When children are born with severe, debilitating conditions like some forms of spina bifida—in which some vertebrae on top of the spinal cord remain unfused and open—their lives can often amount to little more than a few months of extended agony. If they do survive, they usually need multiple ...
Imagine: it’s a Friday night, and you’re heading out for a night on the town. You’re dressed, showered, and smelling nice; all that’s left is to swing by the nearest CVS—not for a pack of gum or condoms, but for a gram of cocaine or a hit of ecstasy. Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron ...
The United States continues to be a nation of immigrants. An estimated 11 million undocumented people live in the U.S., and thousands more migrate legally: Roughly 140,000 employment-based and 480,000 family-based visas are issued each year. Yet the tide of public opinion is turning against this ...
How much is being American worth to you? Or British, Japanese, or German? The value of one’s nationality is largely intangible, but Nobel laureate Gary Becker tells Big Think that putting a price on citizenship is the best solution for dealing with immigration in developed countries. A professor of ...
When President George W. Bush came to office in 2001, the U.S. was sending $1.4 billion a year to Africa in humanitarian and development aid, including programs intended to foster democracy, fight corruption and poverty, and combat the rampant HIV/AIDS epidemic. By 2006, the U.S. had quadrupled ...