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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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A conservative take on the world
My fellow BIG THINK blogger, Mark Seddon, has written that Glenn Beck is "Goebbels" or a Fascist or Nazi rousing the masses up in a dangerous, murderous way. Palin and the Tea Party and so forth are all Fascists! If we don't wake up, freedom and decency may not have much of future. America today ...
Bob Duggan, BIG THINK's artistic blogger, worries that nobody is thinking about the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. I agree that there's not enough political reflection about that war. Political reflection means, among other things, looking to statesmanship--or political leadership--as a ...
I hesitate to undermine the good will I might have built up with BIG THINK readers by writing about uniter-not-divider topics like movies and happiness. But Reagan's birthday is this weekend, and I did write a contribution to a symposium put together by the encyclopedia people that might outrage ...
BIG THINK's great little interview with Danny Rubin got me thinking about the relationship between happiness and mortality. His very philosophic film is all about our "rightly understood" theme of the connections between virtue, happiness, and personal love. Groundhog Day, of course, is all ...
The author of the Declaration of Independence and surely our most "intellectual" president, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that we have life and liberty for the pursuit of happiness. In his private letters, Jefferson carefully distinguished between the modern, individualistic life devoted to the pursuit ...
Blue Valentine is a psychologically ambitious and impressively subversive effort by a new filmmaker. It is, in a subtle but clear way, a pro-life movie. It's quite jarring and claustrophobic; the psychological intensity and instability surely are meant to keep viewers from relaxing and just ...
BIG THINK has displayed a taste of the astute social commentary of Robert Putnam--the man who was so worried that so many Americans were bowling alone. The success of the megachurch, Putnam explains, should be integrated into business models, combining, as it does, impressive overall size with ...
So the headline is a bit extreme to get your attention. But let me share with you my favorite conservative response to our president's challenging and unevenly interesting speech last night--Yuval Levin's. Here's a big taste: This is certainly not a time when the economy is strong or steady ...
Ronald Reagan would have been 100 on February 6. If they had a cure for Alzheimer's, you know he would have made it. Health-obsessed Americans today (disproportionally sophisticated liberals) should at least look to Reagan for longevity tips. He was one of our more vigorous presidents, despite ...
The modern world may have been inaugurated with the thought that we can and should make ourselves happy in this world. No longer should we be, as St. Augustine wrote, happy in hope for God’s gracious deliverance from our otherwise inescapable misery. Our new goal is to work to change ourselves ...
BIG THINK has done has the big service of presenting many, many excellent and expert views on what happiness is and how to be happy. Surely, we increasingly think, this is the kind of self-help advice we need the most. Eventually, I'll get around to commenting on some of those expert opinions ...
So, in the wake of the boring--yet annoying--Golden Globes, I've been asked what movies of last year I'd recommend that the foreign correspondents slighted. Let me say, to begin with, that my list of last year's bests probably wouldn't include the award-winning The Social Network. How ...
BIG THINK displays a large number wonderful accounts of how science today is transforming our lives--appealing to our hopes, our pride, and, occasionally, our humility. I thought I'd share with you somethng I wrote along those lines in one of the most illuminating scientific journals around--The ...
Most of you won't believe this, but I've actually gotten several requests to say more about Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, rightly called the best book ever written on America and on democracy. This two-volume study, written by a French aristocrat on the basis of his journey to our ...
Here's the most thoughtful conservative appreciation of the President's speech. And here are some points I want to emphasize: 1. The president did not blame the shooting on "inflammatory rhetoric." There's no evidence whatsoever that political rhetoric or tone was the cause of the act of a ...