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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In the spirit of maintaining an open mind, and in an attempt to purge myself of past prejudices, I will be re-reading The Great Gatsby this weekend. After all, this is the perfect time of year to read Gatsby, as Big Think blogger Andrea Chalupa pointed out in this recent tribute, noting that ...
What's the Latest Development? At the end of the 2013 fall semester, the University of Colorado at Boulder will see its first engineering student graduate from its GoldShirt program, which gives selected students an extra year of preparatory courses before admitting them to the regular ...
What's the Latest Development? A Consumer Reports study revealed that last year, 78 percent of parents helped create their kids' Facebook pages, and 7.5 million users were younger than 13, the minimum age requirement for having an account. Amy Jo Martin, CEO of social media strategy and ...
What's the Latest Development? A small but growing number of aging baby boomers, primarily women who don't have or don't live near children and younger relatives, are choosing group housing in which they live together, share expenses, and provide extra social support. Bonnie Moore opened her ...
What's the Latest Development? Recent class action lawsuits and settlements against major social media sites highlight some of the big problems with typical terms-of-service contracts and the customer's understanding of them. In response, writer Ari Melber, law professor Woodrow Hartzog, and ...
One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that everybody has a voice. And one of the terrible things about the Internet is that everybody has a voice. A lot of people don’t have anything worth listening to, and so sifting through that and finding a way to determine the signal out of all ...
I think it’s important to have people who inspire people to think. But it’s really, really bad to have gurus who you look for the answer from because I think the key is, you want to question authority for yourself. So to the extent that an Einstein gets people to want to open the black box ...
I’m actually fairly despairing about the times we live in on many levels. I think there’s more shame in being poor than there ever was. I think we also have a cultural dynamic of blaming the victim: if you’re poor and you’re struggling, you’ve fallen out of the race, then there’s something ...
Commencement speeches are this weird kind of product. You're about to go outside the bubble and I'm going to give you the last bit of magic, and the magic falls flat often. But sometimes it sticks. So if your school didn't have a good one, you can find a lot of them online. For instance, Steve ...
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So writes Tolstoy in the famous opening lines to Anna Karenina. It is well then that Bruce Feiler offers 200 new ideas on how to make a happier family in his new book, The Secrets of Happy Families. Of course, nobody ...
What's the Latest Development? Siyuan Xing and Jia Jiang, graduate students working in the Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at the University of California-Davis, have designed a textile that is not only water-repelling but self-draining. It's a combination of a hydrophobic fabric and water ...
What's the Latest Development? At last weekend's 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire, pediatrician and pain researcher Amy Baxter gave a lecture on Buzzy, a bee-shaped device she created that, when applied to a patient who's about to receive an injection, uses its built-in vibrating motor and ice pack to ...
What's the Latest Development? California-based UberMedia has launched UberAds, a platform that sends ads to customers' mobile devices based on their publicly-available social media data -- from sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest -- as well as their (optional) GPS location. Using this ...
A luxury apartment building is now under construction in Taiwan, and its design was inspired by the double helix of the DNA molecule. The building, named Agora Garden, will twist at a 90 degree angle, and not just because that's a cool thing to do. The design creates more surface area, and enables ...
There are some religion-bashers out there who make it sound as though religion is the source of all violence and conflict in the world. Richard Dawkins has come close to saying something like that, so did Christopher Hitchens. And it’s just empirically false. The greatest bloodshed in the ...