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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Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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Listening for Sanctity in Everyday Life
If you feel that life is uncomplicated, easy, satisfying, carefree, under control – then this post is not for you. On the other hand, if you feel frustrated, anxious, deeply bored, or burdened by the sense that your life is meaningless – then this post may interest you. In what follows, I will ...
In order to avoid destructive consequences, people must have reasonable opportunities to satisfy their desire for purity. Many horrors have been committed from fear of contamination. What else is “ethnic cleansing”? There is something of this fear, too, in the persecution of heretics, apostates ...
Sometime in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E. a group of Canaanites distinguished themselves from their neighbors by advocating the worship of Yahweh alone, to the exclusion of other Canaanite gods like Baal and Asherah. In the Hebrew Bible, the passion of this early movement may be ...
These days it’s hard enough to get any job at all. If it is part of a good life to have a job that you love then the current situation of unemployment, which is already life-threatening to many people, is all the worse. There is a lot that needs explanation here: is it part of a good life to ...
What if everyday life as I know it is irredeemably complicit in injustice? If this is the case, then does justice not demand that everyday life be overturned? These are haunting questions, particularly given the premise of this blog: that it is worth attuning oneself to what is sanctified in ...
There was a German Jewish philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig who died of ALS at the age of 43 in 1929. The words on the very last page of his great work The Star of Redemption are printed to form an equilateral triangle pointing downward and at the downward point in all capital letters is written ...