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 ideas in little doses
In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama sang the praises of green technology, calling it “an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.” The security and environmental benefits may be clear, but most green tech ...
The world's elite have descended upon Davos. But the recent publication of a report claiming that the financial crisis was "avoidable" casts a shadow over what could be the world's most expensive and exclusive retreat. “The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen ...
In his State of the Union Address, President Obama issued a dramatic challenge for America to re-invent itself through technological innovation. Whether the country believes that government investment, private enterprise, or some combination of the two is the way forward, few would argue with the ...
Just when clean energy policy appeared to have fallen to the bottom of the national agenda, President Obama gave it renewed political life in his State of the Union Address. Obama called for investment in the "Apollo Projects of our time," to be funded by eliminating "the billions in taxpayer ...
The miraculous recovery of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has focused attention on the advances in treatment for brain injuries previously thought to be non-survivable. So-called "aggressive care" practices developed in the civilian medical world have been perfected in military hospitals in Iraq and ...
The media frenzy leading up to Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington yesterday painted the stakes as being high—extremely high in some cases. Yet the headlines since the summit have focused primarily on technical malfunctions rather than the political implications of the meeting between ...
Theirs is the most fabled rivalry in chess history. Anatoly Karpov, the defensive "boa constrictor," and Garry Kasparov, the aggressive tactician, met for the first time in 1984 in the World Chess Championship. And over the course of their careers, they have played a total of 167 serious games ...
Many in the media have speculated that Jared Loughner's heavy use of marijuana could have been in some way behind his recent rampage in Arizona that cost six people their lives, and left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded. Is this claim just media hype or based on real science ...
The World Wide Web turned 20 this month. To mark the occasion, its creator and protector, Tim Berners-Lee (who invented it so that particle physicists from CERN—the current home of the Large Hadron Collider—could collaborate remotely) warns that the egalitarian ubiquity of the Web "is being ...
As Congress crams an ambitious agenda into the current lame-duck session, the period between election and inauguration has come under renewed scrutiny. University of Notre Dame law professor John Copeland Nagle tells Big Think that these sessions are "fundamentally contrary to the idea of ...
As former U.S. President Jimmy Carter explained in the Big Think special series "When China Rules the World," China is shaping up to be one of America's primary competitors in the future global economy. The infographics below provide an entry-level fact base for putting the growing rivalry into ...
The Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies and promotes policies and programs to increase the recovery and recycling of beverage containers, maintains a running count of the number of cans and bottles that have been landfilled, littered, and incinerated in the U.S ...
Think again before you reach into your pocket to give; the money you donate to feed starving children may actually be prolonging war in places like Darfur and Somalia, says Dutch journalist Linda Polman. Darfur is ruled by quite a sophisticated military regime which charges aid organizations for ...
In the wake of a global meltdown that exposed the fragility of our financial system, it's understandable that many people are suspicious of the stability of our centralized monetary systems. "We have had 97 major banking crashes over the last 25 years, and we have 178 monetary crashes over ...
Theodore C. Sorensen, the special counsel to President John F. Kennedy who wrote the president's speeches and helped shape his policy, has died, according to an obituary in the New York Times. Sorensen is credited with the "passages of soaring rhetoric" that characterized Kennedy's speeches ...