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.
Theory & political commentary
Critics of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to ban the sale of soft drinks over 16 ounces in convenience stores, movie theaters and street carts are having a field day. Big Thinker Peter Lawler labels Bloomberg the “sugar Nazi.” Tucker Carlson calls him “an out-of-touch rich guy ...
Mitt Romney’s plan for education, released last week, sounds a number of predictable conservative themes: union bashing, continued reliance on standardized testing, expansion of charter schools and reform or elimination of teacher tenure. Romney has a few new ideas as well, none of them good ...
A little science-fiction philosophy to provoke you to remember on Memorial Day, courtesy of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit: Suppose you were given the chance to teleport yourself, Star Trek style, directly to your holiday picnic or barbecue today, avoiding traffic and allaying fears about ...
On Mother’s Day, in a sermon to his flock at the Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina, Pastor Charles Worley revealed his plan to rid America of its homosexuals: Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there....Do the same thing for the ...
The blind 40-year-old Chinese dissident who escaped from house arrest in April — improbably evading guards, finding his way to the U.S. embassy in Beijing and, after a diplomatic fracas, acquiring a visa to study law in the United States — landed at Newark Liberty airport on Saturday. Less than a ...
I’m not aware of any polls tracking Americans’ attitudes toward scholars of political science, but if last week’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives is any sign, we’d better watch our backs. On Thursday, Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona proposed an amendment to a 2013 spending bill that ...
The cover headline caught my eye, and I surprised both the elderly leafletter and myself when I took a copy of the “Watchtower” magazine on my way out of the subway station this morning. Religion and politics is one of my favorite subjects. What do the Jehovah’s Witnesses have to say? What ...
The troubling chronicle of blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has me thinking about the trial of another dissident who faced a life-changing dilemma of his own 2411 years ago in ancient Athens. Chen, like Socrates, is a gadfly on the hide of his polity. Where Socrates was condemned for ...
Today as I meditate on Arum and Roksa's much-discussed study, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” my thoughts turn to academic life at the institution where I teach. This week in my colleague’s advanced Latin class, students are reading Exodus in the Vulgate and hunting ...
What matters in life? Will Wilkinson wrote wrote a nice Big Think post on Friday quoting some recent psychological research and suggesting the answer is “memorable social experience”: A number of recent studies bear out the idea that spending on experience is more likely to boost ...
My Tuesday post examined parents’ limited options in the age of the standardized test. But what is a teacher to do who is fed up with the testing regime? “I’d prefer not to” may work for Bartelby but won’t fly in a public school. Nor will resistance to the test prep regime. This year, 3rd, 4th ...
These are heady days for my 7-year-old daughter. She won’t be sitting in her New York City public school classroom much at all this week. Instead, she and her second-grade classmates are swimming at the YMCA, visiting a Dutch farmhouse in Brooklyn, taking a field trip to South Street Seaport in ...
Now that Senate Republicans have blocked debate on President Obama’s proposed “Buffett Rule” to impose a minimum tax rate on Americans who earn over $1 million, a few questions present themselves. Will this defeat strengthen the President’s re-election campaign? Believing it will accomplish ...
I got a taste of a promising new mode of self-government last month in Brooklyn, when my wife and I — and thousands of other ordinary civilians — helped decide how a bit of the New York City budget should be spent. It was a pilot program in “participatory budgeting,” a concept that began in Brazil ...
While it’s tempting to mock the hollow chants of health care law critics as Jon Stewart did last Thursday — “what do we want? freedom! when do we want it? now!” — Adam Liptak reminds us in the New York Times that the fate of Obama’s signature health care law will likely hinge on one man’s ...