What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

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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Transcript

vanden Heuvel: For me, it does begin with a, you know, a kind of non-corporate approach to life. It begins with a world that is more peaceful, more just. It begins with the mantra which [informed] the Obama campaign’s best part, in my view, which was the organizing from below, which was about respect, inclusion, opportunity, empowerment, and those are attributes of a Left and progressive community that I believe in, and independence is what The Nation has been about for 143 years, so that we’ve never been, as we stated in our founding statement in 1865, the organ of any party, and that is where you find, I think, a strong basis for being a true, free-thinking, Liberal lefty progressive.