Think Tank

What is the Big Idea? Step into a classroom in North Korea and you will find very little that differs from a classroom in New York City - chalkboard, rows of desks, chairs, desktop computers and bulletin boards full of text and pictures. But stay a little longer and you might notice something ... Read More

What is the Big Idea? While Congress dukes it out over the federal interest rates on student loans, venture capitalist Peter Thiel has a solution for college students who don't want to be saddled with huge amounts of debts in an unstable economy. The solution, he says, is to drop out of college ... Read More

What's the Big Idea? David Eagleman's Laboratory for Perception is located on the ground floor of Baylor College of Medicine, but the vibe is more creative think tank than clinical academic enclave. The walls are enamelled in dry-erase paint and marked up with impromptu sketches, arrows, and ... Read More

What's the Big Idea? In the world of online dating there are sites for people claiming just about any sort of interest or identity, whether they are a dog lover or a conservative Christian, or even a married person looking to have an affair. That's right, a dating site for married people ... Read More

How much should Facebook be worth? According to a recent poll, two-thirds of active investors think Facebook will be overvalued when it goes public today, while half of all Americans think a $100 billion valuation is too high. This skepticism about Facebook's value is nothing new. In fact ... Read More

In 2005, Thomas Friedman elegantly pieced together the global frontier for readers in The World is Flat. A book that will go down in history as one that was right on the money, Friedman delineated the interconnectedness of our new world; an environment dramatically shaped by cutting-edge technology ... Read More

Get this: there is a startup called I Dream of Space that is selling posters for $10 that also come with the chance to win a trip to space.  In other words, your $10 ticket could be worth a $200,000 seat on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo or a $95,000 trip on XCOR Aerospace's Lynx. Apparently the ... Read More

Elon Musk is going to Mars. With or without NASA. Of course, the ambitious former PayPal entrepreneur who founded SpaceX in 2002 has to take one step at a time. A very important first step, indeed a milestone, will happen this Saturday, May 19 at 4:55 a.m, when the SpaceX Dragon is scheduled to ... Read More

What is the Big Idea? Flickr, a photo sharing application with a social media component, used to be one of the most popular tools for sharing photos on the Web. Its tagline read "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." And until three years ago ... Read More

I kind of want to move to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Actually, not really, but I may visit more often once the new 2nd Avenue Subway line is up and running in 2016. And that's because New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit has made the uncommonly wise decision to ... Read More

What is the Big Idea? Social media has been inspiring change in the way business leaders interact with their customer base. And for good reasons. Companies that adopt social technologies can see a 50 percent increase in customer satisfaction, 48 percent increase in business leads, and 24 percent ... Read More

What’s the Big Idea? “Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets,” said Andy Warhol. It seems America agrees: adult entertainment is an estimated $10 billion dollar industry in the U.S., though the ethics of capturing and manufacturing sexual desire on ... Read More

"My guess is that the Y chromosome of every living man has spent at least one generation in the testis of a warlord," the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes once told The New York Times . One sexually prolific warlord in particular was Genghis Khan, whose Y chromosome is now found in 16 million men in ... Read More

Remember the scene in "The Social Network" when Mark Zuckerberg's friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin is pushed out of the company and physically escorted out of the building? Some believe Saverin got his sweet revenge when he spilled the beans as Ben Mezrich's main source for The ... Read More

The Mind/Body Split in American Acting (and culture) On the whole, and with a few notable exceptions, Hollywood expects its great actors to play themselves in every role. We want primal authenticity, and view physicalization of character with suspicion. Actors who excel at altering the way they ... Read More