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Hoarders have "a sense of intense responsibility for objects and an unwillingness to waste them," says Randy Frost. They also have an ability to find beauty in things that other people might not appreciate.

A good analysis of the coming newspaper paywalls was recently written in The Financial Times by John Gapper. The London Times and The New York Times have announced their intention […]

When I was a kid, I found myself glued to the television whenever a moon landing took place. Even when others grew jaded by repeated landings, I never lost sight […]

Ever since Lafayette, some connection between America and France, however tenuous, has existed. One of the strongest bonds between the two countries is the American love of French art. When […]

“I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a creator.” As soon as I heard these words from  Stephen Hayes through the phone, I sat back in my chair. […]

As the wake of destruction trailing the Gulf oil spill continues to look increasingly dark, I can’t help but think back to the speech that Interior Secretary Salazar made when […]

How a quest to combine aesthetics with mathematics produced one of math’s most famous, and gorgeous, images: the Mandelbrot set.

How designers are revolutionizing corrective eyewear with low-cost, durable, beautifully designed glasses for the developing world, where lack of access to vision healthcare presents an obstacle to anything from basic safety to education

“Remarkable claims require remarkable proof.” — Carl Sagan The “multiverse” idea—once thought to be so crazy it only belonged on late night television—has now become the dominant theory in all of […]

“When I tell people I would like to paint them, I already have their portrait in mind,” German artist Otto Dix once said. “I don’t paint people who don’t interest […]

The New Republic reviews “Heather Has Two Mommies,” one of the first books aimed at young children to tackle the taboo of depicting same-sex partners as parents.

Duke University Professor Negar Mottahedeh says Islamic law in Iran helped produce the country’s distinctive film aesthetic.

The Web and cloud computing have made the work of archivists and record keepers faster than ever before, but is information lost in the internet’s labyrinth any more accessible than […]

“I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at,” Georgia O’Keeffe once said of her abstract works, “not copy it.” Famous for her […]

Bob Duggan: I’m not sure what I think about the idea of scientifically determining the creative process as a brain process. If they succeed, would they arrive at a formula for creativity? 

What do the Egyptian pyramids, the Mona Lisa and George Clooney’s face all have in common? The “golden ratio” according to The Independent writer Steve Connor.

While writers have a moral obligation to address all of humanity in their works, Orhan Pamuk is skeptical of the aesthetics of avoiding categorizations entirely.

Should archaeological artifacts remain in the country in which they were found – or does the law of “finder’s keepers” prevail?

Banks have some of the largest collections of art. Since the bail out, should the public see an aesthetic return on investment?

The story of the U.S. Patent Office official who resigned his post in the 19th century because he believed there was nothing left to invent makes a point about human […]

Jay Smooth discusses music and the value of aesthetic expression

If you’ve ever been comforted by the fact that, though calculus is Greek to you, you’ve always been “good with words,” or that, though you can’t spell to save your […]

As we’ve blogged before on Big Think, the state of science savvy in America is pretty sorry. Only about a third of us accept evolution through natural selection, even lower […]

An article from the New Scientist claims that people’s barriers to thinking more greenly are mostly psychological. People are more likely to adopt green attitudes if (1) they think their […]

This is an interpretation of Niccolo Machivelli's 1517 imcomplete poem L'Asino. The so-called cynic cold-blooded advisor of evil shows a 'parenthetical' aestheticism in his perception of friendship. Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the great prospects of aesthetic politics comes to be a useful tool for the interpretation of Machiavelli's 'poetic therapy'.

The basketball and hip-hop culture term "dunkadelic" was created in 1997. Should the hoops and hip-hop inspired term be applied to the American English dictionary?

This essay describes a model for urban development that takes into account and makes use of the externalities that exist in the built environment. Buildings and the people that inhabitat them makes neighborhoods and vice versa the value of a building is in its locations. How can better frame this relationship between an object and its environment? How can develop strategies for a integral area development that learn from the best global examples?

Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations. Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial: the perpetrators could be dysfunctional or absent parents, teachers, other adults, or peers.