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.
Freethought in the light of the sun
This weekend I saw Lincoln, which was a tremendous movie. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a compelling performance as President Abraham Lincoln during the closing days of the Civil War, when he battled with a fractious Congress to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery ...
Hemant Mehta has just published a new book, The Young Atheist's Survival Guide . It's about the growing and increasingly important demographic of atheist high schoolers - their trials and travails, the opposition and sometimes shocking persecution they've faced in their schools and their communities ...
The 2008 elections, in which pro-gay-marriage campaigners won a sweep at the ballot box, is a clear sign that the tide of society is shifting in favor of equality. We've known for a long time that this was coming, since the younger generations now replacing the older ones are overwhelmingly ...
[Editor's Note: Please welcome guest blogger Andrew Tripp, author of Considered Exclamations and president and co-founder of the DePaul Alliance for Free Thought, a Secular Student Alliance and Center for Inquiry on Campus affiliate. I invited Andrew to write this post following a conversation ...
Ireland's Catholic bishops have released an official statement on the death of Savita Halappanavar, to my surprise. It may well be that the outcry was so great, they felt obligated to respond. If so, it would be a rare instance of the church being swayed by external pressure. However, the ...
My latest column has been posted on AlterNet, 50 Reasons to Boycott the Catholic Church. In it, as you might have guessed from the title, I list fifty arguments for why the Roman Catholic church is a thoroughly immoral organization and an enemy of progress. If this gets a good reception, I'll write ...
After several days, the fragile ceasefire in the latest iteration of Israel and Gaza's endless war is still holding. But while the bombs were falling, there was no shortage of voices calling for the battle to be escalated even further, like Gilad Sharon, son of the former Israeli Prime Minister ...
Some progressive Christian bloggers I respect have been writing enthusiastically about a new book, Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which they say proves that the Bible has been misused to justify patriarchy and demands for female submission. When the book became a bestseller ...
Earlier this week, I answered a set of "tough questions" posed to advocates of reproductive choice. Well, turnabout is fair play. Although millions of religious people want abortion to be outlawed, they're surprisingly vague on the details. What exactly would their ideal society look like? How ...
In an article on the Gospel Coalition website, a Christian writer named Trevin Wax asserts that anti-choice politicians are held to a higher standard than pro-choice ones. He lists ten "hard questions" that he thinks pro-choice candidates aren't asked often enough. I'm not a politician, but I ...
So, I've decided to sign up for Skype after getting several invitations to use it for speaking gigs. (Apparently, sometime when I wasn't paying attention, this became a thing that everyone has.) I don't really know anything about how this works, but my profile name is daylightatheism. If you'd like ...
Following up on my post about the preventable death of Savita Halappanavar due to anti-choice theology, three Catholic blogs at Patheos have weighed in: "Savita's tragic death could have been avoided", "Savita's Death and Common Sense", "and Savita Halappanavar's Death". All three of them take ...
Savita Halappanavar is dead, and she shouldn't be. That has to be the beginning and end of anything anyone writes about this. Savita was 31 years old, married, four months pregnant with her first child, a dentist who lived near Galway in Ireland. Last month, she went to the hospital with what ...
This past weekend, I was in Springfield, Missouri for Skepticon V ("the fifth most annual Skepticon yet"). I had such a fantastic time at Skepticon IV in 2011, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd go back this year, and I wasn't disappointed. Skepticon is one of the largest atheist conventions in ...
I've written some overarching thoughts about last week's presidential election, but I wanted to dwell on one of its more fascinating aspects: the extent to which the Republican party was blindsided by the outcome. Going into Tuesday, countless Republicans had predicted a solid victory for Mitt ...