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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It might soon be hard to find a discounted Louis Vuitton bag on eBay, thanks to a ruling made by the European Commission this week. The new regulations, which come into effect in June, allow brands more control over how and by whom their products can be sold online. At the request of high-end ...
After a series of snubs, Europe is suddenly getting a bunch of positive attention from the US. What happened? Maybe Washington is impressed that, after a prolonged struggle to deal with Greece’s debt problems, the European Union was finally able to reach an agreement that made everyone happy ...
What kind of international political influence would the United States have if Barack Obama’s most notable characteristic were his love of haikus? Probably not very much. For the European Union, a bloc in constant struggle to gain international clout, this is an actual problem – the only thing ...
Three months after the Copenhagen Climate Conference’s failure to reach a legally binding global emissions-reduction deal, there hasn’t been much talk of what the next step will be. But the Europeans, for whom Copenhagen was the ultimate disappointment, are now trying to get back on track – with or ...
The EU's reluctance to bail out a floundering Greece raises all kinds of questions about whether or not European states will ever unify. But we sort of already knew that they don't want to. Talks of solutions to Greece's massive deficit problems began nicely enough last week when EU leaders agreed ...