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.
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Stories of yearning and earning a living
It’s getting to be Gatsby season! Summer marks a popular time to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Of course, the novel’s drama begins and ends with the summer. But with poetic descriptions like “the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a ...
“Everyone can write but there are few good writers. Just because everyone can [write] doesn’t mean that there’s talent,” Paul Verhoeven told an audience at the Tribeca Film Festival after a screening of Tricked, his crowdsourced film experiment. “I wouldn’t think that [crowdsourcing] is the method ...
One of the most memorable moments in the HBO film And the Band Played On , honored at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary, is a scene where an AIDS researcher, in 1983 New York, fights over a public payphone in Grand Central. In the 24-hour Twitter news ...
Enter a rapidly changing world where a passionate scientist by the name of Isaac Newton burns political bridges in London, a royal astronomer, Edmond Halley, seeks a powerful formula from his friend Newton and spies on him for the Crown, as both men fall in love with the same brilliant researcher ...
“Once you are a conscious being you have no choice but to be a change agent,” South African anti-apartheid heroine and academic Dr. Mamphela Ramphele told Charlie Rose—a rare male in Lincoln Center yesterday—at the opening night of the Women in the World Summit. Dr. Ramphele’s inspiring remarks ...
Where were you when you first learned that there are plastic landfills the size of continents floating in our oceans? What should have been a wake-up call hasn’t slowed the disposable plastic consumption industry, which benefits a few corporations to the detriment of us all. The big idea presented ...
Ilya Naishuller, a 29-year old Russian director and front man for the Moscow punk band Biting Elbows, won the Internet this week. His band’s latest stunning music video, Motherf*cker, which he directed, earned the attention of Hollywood agents and a Tweet that says “so well done”—written by Oscar ...
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little," said Agnes de Mille, the great American choreographer. "The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” Yet oftentimes we ...
Last night was one of the most exciting Academy Awards ceremonies. Some of the excitement came from the incredible performances— Dame Shirley Bassey singing “Gold Finger,” Barbra Streisand popping up with “Memories,” and the powerful live performance by the cast of Les Miserables. The evening’s ...
The magic “x-factor” that people talk about when they talk about talent is not so magical: it’s simply a matter of hard work. And no other craft reminds one of the torments of hard work than writing. Unlike the sculptor, the writer has to create mounds of clay from scratch—pages and pages of ...
While Americans observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the historic swearing-in of President Barack Obama to a second term today, using the bibles of Lincoln and MLK, across the pond they're honoring another champion of freedom. Today is the first ever "Orwell Day." The prolific George Orwell ...
Imagine if nude women in fashion magazines, action movies, and music videos, suddenly screamed out against political corruption, debilitating income inequality, or oppression by religious leaders. Femen, a group of all-female protesters who use their breasts to garner global media attention, want ...
Last weekend, my best friend from college, an elementary school teacher, visited me in New York. We were having lunch on Friday when she looked up from checking the news on her phone and said, “There was another school shooting.” Her face had turned pale. Her school in Colorado trains multiple ...
Over the summer, I had the opportunity to be at the historic K’s Hamburger in Troy, Ohio. For generations, republican presidential candidates have been stumping at this little hamburger shop in Troy’s picturesque downtown. The line to get into Governor Mitt Romney’s rally there last June was long ...
On a warm spring night in Paris, May 29, 1913, a riot broke out in the Champs Elysee Theatre during the premier of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” As NPR explains, the aristocracy was not ready for the symphony’s “jagged rhythms, crunching discord, and the strange jerking of the dancers on ...