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.
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Big ideas in little doses
You know an Internet meme has gone viral when it reaches the White House. Today, President Obama released a three-minute video as part of sex columnist Dan Savage's "It Gets Better Project," an online video series created in response to a spate of recent suicides by teens that were bullied for ...
Former Big Think guest Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, has died of cancer at the age of 85, according to the New York Times. The newspaper describes him as "a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and ...
More than half of the world’s population lives near an urban center. But as our cities grow increasing traffic has clogged roads and highways. In much of the U.S., a car—there are 246 million registered, as of 2009—is a near-necessity. Meanwhile, longer commutes have been linked with severe health ...
When fine fragrance perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, a recent Big Think guest, saw our video interview with filmmaker John Waters—in which Waters divulged his affection for a deadly work of contemporary art by Karen Sander that amounts to not much more than a blank canvas infested by toxic mold ...
On February 16th, 2008, former CBS news correspondent and Afghanistan expert Jere Van Dyk had been hiking through the remote and mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan when his interpreters and he were surrounded and captured by a gang of Taliban fighters. "I saw a man standing three feet away from ...
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa wasn't fazed after a gang of baseball-bat-wielding Gambino crime family members nearly beat him to death for making disparaging comments about John Gotti Sr. on his radio show during the mafia Don's fourth and final trial in 1992. "[They] assumed that I would ...
Few people have felt the muzzle of an automatic machine gun in their gut, let alone survived a kidnapping on their birthday. In January 1998, then-federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was walking home through the streets of Manhattan, expecting to spend his evening celebrating his birthday with ...
To what lengths would you go to survive in the face of death? Could you amputate your own arm to free it from beneath a boulder? Could you survive 10 weeks in the harsh Australian outback, subsisting just on grasshoppers, frogs, and leeches? At what point would you give up? As part of our new ...
Hip hop legend and Big Think expert, Wyclef Jean may soon add the title of president to his list of accomplishments. The former Fugee is expected to announce his bid for presidency of his birthplace Haiti on Thursday. The small Caribbean nation is still recovering from a massive 7.0 magnitude ...
While the large banks have survived in one form or another, a spate of small- and medium-size banks are closing across the country at a rate of four to six per week—and almost always on Fridays. In 2009, 140 community and regional banks failed. A little over halfway through 2010, already 108 have ...
The thirteen-story, $100 million Islamic center and mosque planned for 45-47 Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site has stirred a swell commentary across the U.S., with notable politicians and influential organizations weighing in -- even as plans for construction move forward ...
The FBI today released the 423-page file they had kept over the years on left-wing historian Howard Zinn, who died in January. When Zinn sat for an interview with Big Think in 2008, he talked about a wide range of topics, including the current state of race in America, his personal philosophy ...
Whatever you want to call it, a half-zebra, half-donkey hybrid was born last week in a wildlife preserve in Georgia. The offspring of a zebra father and a donkey mother, the "zonkey" looks like a donkey but has characteristic zebra stripes on its legs and face. Prompted by this cute little zonkey ...
Microfinance—a system of small loans and money services geared toward small businesses—has been heralded as a bold new financial frontier, opening up a wealth of opportunity to those otherwise unable to obtain a loan. This attention is not without good cause; microfinance groups provide a ...
In June 2009 the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey bill to reduce carbon emissions through a series of cap-and-trade regulations. The news this week that the Senate version of the bill has removed cap and trade has drawn a wave of commentary and analysis, some of which calls the ...