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Arts & Culture
Faith, Science, and the "Transcendent Instinct"
Can the gap between religion and science ever be bridged? Maybe not, but the conflicting desire for factual truth and spiritual "transcendence" is one many of us feel anyway, and one that only art can fully dramatize. Enter "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who boldly joins the "faith vs. atheism" culture wars in her new novel—and in her Big Think interview this week. Read More
February 4, 2010
Science & Tech
Who're You Calling a Dumb Ape?
The capuchin monkeys that Dr. Laurie Santos and her research team work with are "clever—sometimes more clever than we are." Not only do they sometimes get the better of humans, they also yield a font of insights into the evolutionary origins of human psychological phenomena—including, as the Yale psychologist explains in her Big Think interview, the loss aversion and greed that caused the global financial meltdown. Read More
February 9, 2010
Love, Sex, and Happiness
Eliot Spitzer Talks Love and Redemption
What his sex scandal has taught the ex-Governor about love, marriage, and moving forward after a fall. Read More
January 28, 2010
Health & Medicine
The Recession Started 35 Million Years Ago
Dr. Laurie Santos’s studies of monkey “economics” suggest that greedy, loss-averse human behavior may have deep evolutionary origins. Read More
February 9, 2010
Business & Economics
Why Donating Is More Popular Than Voting
These are, to say the least, intimidating times for non-profits. With the coffers of even the wealthiest companies and individuals under such pressure, efforts to find a donor can seem fanciful and futile. Luckily, as today’s guest and president of the Lincoln Center Rey Levy makes clear, such fear is unjustified. Even when money is scarce, the prospects for donors are still ripe, as giving has shifted to the most legitimate form of active citizenship in America today, with more people donating to charities and non-profits each year than vote. Read More
February 8, 2010
Media & Internet
Google News: Rise of the Aggregator
Since its beta launch in 2002, the Google News aggregator has become one of its company's most successful innovations. In the process, and perhaps inadvertently, it started making headlines of its own. Most famously, NewsCorp's Rupert Murdoch complained that Google is just plain stealing his content and threatened last November to make it invisible to their search crawlers. Others, too, have accused Google of violating its motto, "Don't be evil" (and not just in the news domain, either). In his Big Think interview this week, Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager for Google News, responds. Read More
February 6, 2010
Politics & Policy
Yemen's Radical Transformation
Until 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, Yemen was barely on the Western public's radar. Ever since, it has found itself the nexus of a raging debate. How large is the terrorist presence there? What has fanned the spread of radical Islam within its borders? Will the country become a third front in the war on terror? In a Big Think interview this week, Princeton University Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen provides detailed answers. Read More
February 1, 2010
World
Duke University Professor Negar Mottahedeh says Islamic law in Iran helped produce the country's distinctive film aesthetic. Read More
January 29, 2010
Truth & Justice
The "Mother" of the Civil Rights Movement
William Chafe explains how Ella Baker nurtured the movement—and sometimes challenged its male leadership. Read More
January 15, 2010
Environment
Is the Recession Giving Earth a Break?
The lower manufacturing output associated with the recession has had a tiny curbing effect on global CO2 emissions, buying us a tiny amount of extra time in which to address the climate crisis. That's the good news, says paleontologist and extinction expert Peter Ward. The bad news is that severe climate change is happening anyway, and its likely impact keeps him awake at night. Read More
February 1, 2010
Inspiration & Wisdom
What the man Bertrand Russell called “the most lovable of philosophers” still has to teach us. Read More
February 3, 2010
Belief
Why Two Heads are (Sometimes) Better than One
It started with an ox. New Yorker staff writer James Surowiecki tells the old story involving the British scientist, Francis Galton, who assembled a diverse group of people to guess the weight of an ox. Turned out the group's average was on target. It's a testament to the wisdom of a crowd, right? But are crowds always wiser than individuals? Surowiecki explains. Read More
February 5, 2010
Identity
The philosopher explains the “moral argument” for the existence of God and why it still holds some appeal for contemporary philosophers. Read More
February 3, 2010
Future
The Rise of the Creative Class
Big Think co-founder Peter Hopkins sat down with bestselling author and urban theorist Richard Florida the other week to talk about the new psyche of the American workforce. Florida sees the economic crisis as an inflection point from which a new class of thinkers will arise. Read More
January 15, 2010
Life & Death
The legendary author and activist Howard Zinn passed away this evening at the age of 87. In one of his final interviews, Professor Zinn discussed how he would like to be remembered: for "introducing a different way of thinking about the world," and as "somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before." The interview can be viewed here, and his remarks are quoted in full below: Read More
January 27, 2010
History
Is Yemen Our Next Battleground?
The New York Times claims that the U.S. is already fighting a “third, largely covert war” in Yemen. After the Christmas Day terror attempt, can President Obama keep his promise not to put “boots on the ground” there? Read More
February 1, 2010