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.
Cartographic curiosities
The territorial history of the US seems pretty straightforward: 13 British colonies on the eastern seaboard secede at the end of the eighteenth century, then follow their ‘Manifest Destiny’ westward, eventually encompassing 50 states by the middle of the twentieth century. There are, however ...
Much of the action in the comic strip (and later movies) starring Flash Gordon take place on the fictional planet Mongo. This planet is divided in several realms, such as: Arboria: a forest principality, governed by prince Barin. Frigia: a frozen kingdom, ruled over by queen Fria, cousin to ...
Finland gained independence from Russia right after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. A civil war ensued, along the lines of the post-revolution conflict in Russia itself: ‘Reds’ against ‘Whites’. The conservative ‘White’ forces won out, thanks in part to support of the Germans. An outgrowth of ...
This map is yet another dissection of Europe, this time focussing on the north-south divides in the continent. Some of the boundaries here were already present in one or both of the earlier maps, especially the religious (Protestant-Catholic) and linguistic (Germanic-Romance) divides. Three ...
Beyond the pale is an English expression for anything beyond the limits of the law or of accepted morality. The aforementioned ‘pale’, far from being a symbolic separator, at one time was a very real barrier: it separated the area of Ireland under English control from the (larger) part of the ...
Post #12 shows a map identifying three core areas of Europe with transition zones in between. This map here has a different approach to European cultural diversity. On the one hand, it posits a contiguous cultural core – roughly correspondent, coincidentally with Charlemagne’s empire (plus a ...
For a long time, Australia was known as New Holland, after the country that first explored the island/continent. The British, who eventually colonised the place, at first adopted the name, but settled on an adaptation of the term Terra Australis for their new colony. That name refers to the giant ...
Funny how something as arbitrary as map orientation can skew the perception of countries. On this map, from the vaults of the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas in Austin (and to be found separately here), the Indian Subcontinent is shown ‘upside-down’: South is top ...
One last map by Leopold Kohr, also an addendum to his book ‘The Breakdown of Nations’ (1957). Kohr probably realised that dividing Europe into rectangular, US-style states would clash with the ‘tribal’ makeup of the Old Continent’s culturally diverse peoples. So he modified that idea to propose a ...
“Small is beautiful” is an aptly brief summary of the thinking of Leopold Kohr (1909-1994), an Austrian philosopher influenced by Anarchism and influential on the Green movement. In his best-known work, ‘The Breakdown of Nations’, he applied his theory of size to nations. Why? “There seems only one ...
Franz Ferdinand‘s assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 triggered the First World War. The Austro-Hungarian Archduke and crown prince is known mainly for this (and for the Scottish band named after him), but here’s another interesting piece of info about him: A group of scholars surrounding him came ...
At 8.511.965 km², Brazil is the 5th largest country on earth, the larger ones being Russia, Canada, the US and China (in that order). The country conjures up mostly images of leasurely beach life, or crime-ridden slums. However, Brazil is slowly emerging as an industrial giant and might soon have ...
I was alerted to these maps by a Turkish gentleman, who posts them on his website. They are a reaction to the map of the Middle East, re-drawn as it was in the July issue of the US Armed Forces Journal (mentioned earlier in this blog). This American vision has upset a lot of people in the Middle ...
Belgium sits astride one of the main cultural fault lines of Europe, consisting roughly of a northern half that speaks Dutch and is oriented towards the ‘anglosphere’ and a southern half that speaks French and is oriented towards the ‘francophonie’. Ever since the federalisation of the country from ...
Cornwall is the southwesternmost county of England. As with other ‘extremities’ of the British Isles, it was one of the refuges of the original (partially romanized) Celtic inhabitants, fleeing before the invading Anglo-Saxons. Actually, when it was independent (during a period in the early Middle ...