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
As an architect, Cedric Price (1934-2003) was such a visionary that he inspired the Centre Pompidou in Paris and anticipated the London Eye rather than actually design those things himself. Price’s supposed brilliance is hard to gauge, as very few of his designs were actually built - the most ...
Wine maps are appreciated mainly by the select few who are both cartophiles and oenophiles. Those who are either or neither face a formidable obstacle to cartographic enjoyment, inherent in viticulture: wine regions are a mess to map. In wine-making, the hyperlocal is paramount. Soil type and ...
The Eurovision Song Contest is a resounding success in at least one respect. Set up as a laboratory of European harmony - musically, audiovisually and politically - its first edition [1] featured a mere 7 participating countries, all Western European. The 57th edition, next May in Azerbaijan, will ...
A body of running water may be called any of many different names, the most generic being stream, the most common being river. A river can be defined as ‘a natural stream of water of usually considerable volume’. General terms for smaller streams include creek (smaller than a river) and brook ...
Transcript of an extract from BBC Radio 4 entertainment interview show Chain Reaction (first broadcast on 26 August 2011). Intersperse with a good deal of [live studio laughter]. Kevin Eldon: "Now, Mark, you come from Kent." Mark Steel: "I do, yes." KE: "Are you a Man of Kent or are you ...
“[This is] really a most imaginative way not just to map, but also to empower,” writes Thomas Theis Nielsen of the HarassMap, which plots the incidence of various types of sexual harassment in Cairo. Sexually inappropriate behaviour is widespread in Cairo - in a recent survey, 83% of Egyptian ...
Modern tourism is born of the Grand Tour. From the 17th century onwards, the brahmins of Britain travelled across the Continent for the twin purposes of education and entertainment. The Tour, an itinerant masterclass in antique culture and contemporary manners, gained popularity throughout the ...
The St. Michael Alignment is arguably the most prominent and intriguing of the many ley lines that criss-cross Britain. It runs in a straight line between Land's End, England's southwestern extremity, and Hopton-on-Sea, on the Norfolk coast. Its name derives from the many sites devoted to St ...
"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell", said George Bernard Shaw [1]; in fact, just the odd few weeks of summer vacation may be near enough unbearable - what with all the frantic packing and driving, the getting lost and having forgotten, the primitive lodgings, lousy food and ...
A map in Cees Nooteboom’s novel In the Dutch Mountains shows the Netherlands improbably extended, via a narrow corridor, to a large territory on the Balkans (1). The idea of the map (and the novel) is to provide the Netherlands, well-organised to the point of dullness as it is, with a romantic ...
What to think of others? Stereotypes provide a simple answer to that complex problem. Most such answers, to borrow one of H.L. Mencken's bons mots, are neat, plausible, and wrong. If they do contain a kernel of truth, they often say as much about the spouters of the cliché as about its spoutees ...
This rudimentary map, showing an Iran crudely cut in two, is currently making the rounds of social media in that country. Its message, as clear as it is simple, is that Iran is a house divided (1). More particularly, it is also a stark repudiation of controversial measures for ever stricter ...
When you think of it, borders are paradoxical. They connect what they aim to divide. A borderline marks, with guillotine-like precision, where two territories separate; but no matter how far they expand in either direction, those territories resemble each other closest at their common boundary ...
Over the centuries, the high seas have served as a blank canvas for cartographers’ worst nightmares. They have dotted the oceans with a whole crypto-zoo of island-sized whales, deathly seductive mermaids, giant sea serpents, and many more - a whole panoply of heraldic horrors. As varied as this ...
“We are the mediocre presidents. You won't find our faces on dollars or on cents! There's Taylor, there's Tyler, There's Fillmore and there's Hayes. There's William Henry Harrison,” (Harrison:) “I died in thirty days!” “We… are... the... Adequate, forgettable, ...