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.
How business is done in the 21st century
Do the times make the person or the person the times? Gautam Mukunda, author of the new book Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter , argues that most political science research "either implicitly assumes or explicitly argues that individual leaders don't much matter at all." Mukunda says that ...
By Priya Dieterich (guest blogger) Eariler this month in New Delhi, the trial began for the six men accused of beating and gang-raping a young woman who later died from the injuries she sustained. Immediately following this grotesque crime in December, Indians took to the streets in droves to ...
There’s a moment in Keith Richards’ recent memoir when he pauses his tale of addiction and debauchery to reflect that, once a certain number of stories about his excesses had been told and retold in public, his reputation became fixed. No countervailing or complicating evidence of moderation could ...
"We are stepped out upon the world stage now, with the fate of human dignity in our hands," proclaims Daniel Day Lewis in his celebrated portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln . "Blood's been spilled to afford us this moment!" Day Lewis exclaims. "Now, now, now!" While ...
On Tuesday night at 9:00 EST, President Obama will deliver his fifth State of the Union address, the first of his second term. Coming just a few weeks on the heels of his soaring Second Inaugural, the speech will likely dial down the rhetoric a notch as Obama outlines his legislative priorities for ...
Some time in March a puff of white smoke will rise over St. Peter's Square. Will it signal a black Pope from Africa? After the surprising resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, there is speculation that Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson is an early favorite. Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze is another ...
Once again, the Wall Street Journal has published its annual ranking of economic forecasters. Using methods developed with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the newspaper calculated which forecasters made the smallest errors in their prognostications for 2012. There’s just one problem: the ...
Imagine if you could ask the Most Valuable Players of all 47 Super Bowls what they’d learned about winning football games. Wouldn’t that be a great resource for any coach, player, commentator, or fan? As it happens, just such a resource is now available in economics, yet almost no one is using it ...
A few days ago, 64 influential Catholics appealed to their co-religionists in Congress to support gun-control legislation. They laid down a pretty solid Catholic guilt trip: Members of Congress who take pride in their pro-life stance and appeal to family values have no excuse for inaction ...
Last October, a colleague and I speculated on how a special, powerful form of predictive analytics would revolutionize presidential campaigning -- and, if successful, how it might be poorly received by the public thereafter. In our work, he and I focus more on financial, marketing, and online ...
Who could have saved us from the global financial crisis? In a word, women. The release of the Federal Reserve’s transcripts of policymaking meetings up to 2007 has shed new light on the machinations inside the central bank as the Great Recession dawned. One member of the Board of Governors cast in ...
Enjoy the inauguration of Barack Obama on Monday, Democrats: it may be the last opportunity to cheer a president from your party for quite a while. Why this prediction, in the wake of a resounding Obama victory that sent Republicans into angst-ridden bouts of soul-searching? How could the “too ...
On Monday, I suggested that Justice Thomas might build on his first moment of non-silence in seven years. “If he wants to demonstrate that he takes his judicial role seriously with landmark decisions looming,” I wrote, “Justice Thomas should consider asking a question now and then” during Supreme ...
It’s unclear exactly what he said, but on Monday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke during an oral argument for the first time in nearly seven years. What prompted the sabbatical from his studied silence? It appears he took the opportunity to make a sarcastic comment about the quality ...
Editors' Note: On New Year's Day, 2013, protests erupted in China's Guangdong province over government censorship of a newspaper, Southern Weekly. In highly unusual show of resistance, the paper's reporters demonstrated in the streets, protesting the rewriting of a New Year's editorial by the ...