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.
American politics and the big picture
In 2005, The New York Times revealed that under a presidential order signed in 2002, the National Security Agency (NSA) had been monitoring the phone calls, e-mails, and internet traffic of a large number of American citizens without obtaining warrants. With the secret cooperation of AT&T, Verizon ...
In 2006 incumbent Connecticut Senator—and former Vice Presidential candidate—Joe Lieberman lost in the Democratic primaries to Ned Lamont, a relative unknown who had challenged Lieberman's support of the Patriot Act and the Iraq war. Unwilling to accept the results, Lieberman ran in the general ...
Perhaps it's not surprising that people take political results personally. We come to identify with our favored candidate—and sometimes to revile their opponent. When our party wins, we are elated; we it loses, we become dejected. Now a group of researchers has discovered that election results ...
Politicians like to brag about having passed their bills with bipartisan support. It shows that they are willing cooperate with their political opponents and that they are—at least superficially—more concerned with the good of the country than with winning partisan victories. And it's a strategy ...
“If someone tells you he is going to make ‘a realistic decision,’” Mary McCarthy wrote, “you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.” Calling a course of action "realistic" is, of course, a rhetorical strategy. Everyone, after all, thinks they're being realistic. You make a ...
Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski called this week for the agency to formally adopt a set of rules governing access to the Internet. The proposed rules are meant to ensure "net neutrality" by preventing broadband providers from giving preferential access to certain ...
As I wrote yesterday, momentum continues to build in Washington for a health-care reform that includes a provision for a government-sponsored program which would compete with private insurance companies. Greg Sargent highlights a telling new Rasmussen poll today, which shows that a large majority ...
After hearing for months that the so-called “public option” was dead, it looks like it might yet make a miracle recovery. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid finally seem to be putting pressure on Congressional Democrats to include a public option. The reason is simple: the idea a government-run health ...
Before arriving in New England in 1630, John Winthrop famously told his shipmates that their colony would be like “a city upon hill.” Evoking a passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Winthrop told them that they must be an example for all to see. The world would be watching to see how the American ...
As part of its effort to reinvent itself, the Republican National Committee launched a completely redesigned website earlier in the week. The problem is not so much that the website is laughably buggy. Although it certainly was buggy. Not only did it crash during the conference call announcing the ...
During the presidential campaign last year, a woman told Sen. John McCain at a town hall meeting that she couldn’t trust then Sen. Barack Obama because she had read that he was an Arab. McCain replied that while he had disagreements with Obama, she shouldn’t be afraid of him, because he was a ...
Amidst the all the discussion of President Obama’s Nobel Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences quietly made another political statement by giving the Nobel Prize in Economics to to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their analysis of “economic governance.” The choice of Ostrom and ...
Last week I wrote that President Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize more as a show of support for the multilateral policy he advocates than for anything he has actually done. But I also argued that the award is uncomfortably at odds with the fact that the United States is currently fighting wars ...
President Obama is now the just third sitting president to win the Nobel Peace Prize—the first since Woodrow Wilson won in 1919 for his role in setting up the League of Nations. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded the prize to Obama for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy ...
There have been recent signs that the Republicans could bounce back from their devastating defeat last fall in the upcoming midterm elections. As I wrote a month ago, the early signs are that the Democrats may lose ground in the 2010 elections. Now the Washington Post reports that the Democrats are ...