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.
In Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, the character Sheldon Flender poses the following existential question: "Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What ...
What's the Big Idea? When CBS’s crime scene drama CSI became the most-watched show on TV in 2002, many other networks developed a crime scene drama of their own. This isn't much different from what happened in Elizabethan times, as certain genres such as histories or bloody revenge tragedies ...
James Shapiro, Carol Gilligan and guest editor Kenji Yoshino--a professor of English, a psychologist, and a law professor, respectively, discuss how plays like Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and Titus Andronicus speak to our contemporary ideas of love, leadership and revenge. ...
In April, Big Think will be hosting a series titled “How to Think Like Shakespeare.” Like many of you, I grew up with a love of literature, and particularly of Shakespeare, that I set aside when I finished my liberal arts education. I went to law school because I took W.H. Auden’s dictum that ...