Today we’re pleased to announce our second Big Think Book of the Month, the dazzlingly ambitious Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, out May 22, 2012 from […]
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“How do Americans spend their leisure time?” That question was posed by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his 2010 book How Pleasure Works. The answer, Bloom says, is “participating in […]
In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America, as a private membership-based organization, had the right to discriminate against gay people by expelling them or barring […]
The Supreme Court’s recent decision on healthcare reform put more than health policy on the public agenda – it triggered a recurring debate in the United States on the power […]
As I’m writing this post, NASA’s latest Mars mission – the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity – is just hours away from its destination. By the time you […]
Researchers at Ohio State University say that reading a good book written in the first person can change the reader in different ways.
So everyone’s talking about the article by the intellectual Russell Jacoby on the alleged fact that there are no conservative intellectuals anymore. The article isn’t much good, in fact. One […]
What’s the Big Idea? Perhaps the better question is, do humans speak dog? Either way, the debate over whether language is unique to humans, or a faculty also possessed by […]
Glenn Reynolds, one of America’s leading bloggers at Instapundit, has written a very short and accessible book called The Higher Education Bubble. My review amounts to this: It has all […]
Have you ever walked past a monument, stopped to see what or whom it was for, and either still had no idea what or whom it was memorializing or had […]
On a late winter day in 1922, the sound of a gun shot resounded with a loud boom in the hills surrounding the house of three-year-old Edgar Curtis. The sound itself wasn’t out of the ordinary, since the Curtises lived near a firing range. What was extraordinary was the question the boy turned to ask his mother: “What is that big, black noise?”
Without question, it’s the desire to “know” that drives scientific inquiry. But as scientists at the forefront of physics or biology will tell you, the more we learn, the more simplistic earlier frameworks seem and the more complex the puzzles become.
If you took the three-question quiz I posted last week, chances are you answered some items incorrectly. Like some of my smart, accomplished friends and family members who took the […]
In some crucial areas of human cognition, we don’t know and we can’t fully trust ourselves. On the bright side, Daniel Kahneman’s work shows that the kinds of errors we tend to make are extremely predictable.
A rash of new companies have sprung up to meet the demand for transportation of crew and cargo to orbit and to the International Space Station left by NASA’s cancelling of the shuttle program.
So I’ve been getting a lot of articles and essays and rants emailed to me on higher education. Based on my previous posts, the impression seems to be that I’m […]
What happens when you do make it to the top of your field, only to find that it’s not exactly what you’d expected or been told to expect?
The new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayeris pregnant, and not planning on taking maternity leave. This has stirred renewed conversation about “having it all,” and women’s lives. I’ve written before in […]
If a so-called “gay gene,” exists, what is the evolutionary logic behind it? A new study offers evidence supporting the so-called “balancing selection hypothesis.”
If you ask anyone who knows me, I like to think they’d tell you that I’m a generally optimistic and cheerful person. But these past few weeks, I’ve felt like […]
In an op-ed in the New York Times last week, Arthur C. Brooks tried to account for data showing that conservatives tend to be happier than liberals. Brooks began by […]
Cities live forever, while companies die all the time. As Jonah Lehrer points out in this video, the design ethos of the city is human-centered. The kinds of interactions that happen in cities make us more productive, whereas companies tend to silo knowledge, rely on old ideas, and then die off.
Throughout his extraordinary career, Pryce has turned his attention outward rather than inward – onto his fellow actors, the audience, the needs of the story. This, he reflects, is the secret to overcoming stage fright: remembering that it isn’t all about you.
Performance art and film art have always been the afterthoughts of museums—the new kids on the block with no room of their own in the big culture houses. Institutions designed […]
“Be yourself” can seem like risky advice in a competitive job market. But you know what’s riskier? Being nobody. Ken Segall explains how he became an ad man for Apple.
Just as Visa offers different perks of membership to its platinum and gold cardholders, so could the government to its citizens, based on wealth.
Love him or hate him, Jeff Koons clings to the center of the contemporary art world like few artists today. And love him or hate him, Stephen Colbert and his show […]
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new piece in The Atlantic about how women cannot “have it all” has provoked a wave of commentary, but none that I have seen has mentioned the article’s […]
Realizing technology’s promise of accelerating our collective learning – of making us smarter, faster – is a matter of building the right tools, then using each to teach the form of knowledge it conveys most efficiently.
Struggling with a foreign language is practically the definition of mental strain: what is the word for “screwdriver” again? did I produce that “ĥ” sound correctly? are they laughing with […]