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In Yemen, Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks about Iran’s influence in Yemen sound as crazy as President Salih’s remarks about a secret room in Tel Aviv controlled by the US sounded to Americans.

Well it should come as no surprise to many who read this blog on a regular basis, but June has not been a good month for Yemen – a suicide […]

Tempers ran high at Big Think’s Farsight 2011 conference in San Francisco this week when Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accused Microsoft’s Bing of using Google data to improve its search results.

What if the Big Muddy was 

One could hardly call me a conspiracy theorist;  I don’t put much stock in Area 51 theories, alternate possibilities of the JFK assassination, or any such popular underground thoughts.  But […]

A new study of 900 kids reports a correlation between the number of hours a woman works outside the home and the BMI* of her children. “For a third grader […]

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. The process of looking back at that time must also include looking back at previous attempts […]

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, a occasion originally conceived for somber reflection on bitter and pointless trench warfare. It is fitting that the Republicans chose this week to announce their plans […]

“Satire works by inference,” cartoonist G.B. Trudeau says in Brian Walker’s new book Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau. “What you condemn should reveal what you value, what you […]

Familiar idioms like ‘a thorn in your side’ and ‘the writing on the wall’ come from the King James Bible. An English linguist has recorded 257 such idioms from the text.

Happy holidays! Every year as I range across the web in search of news and ideas I come across a few articles that stand out as exceptionally worth reading. Today […]

The physicist believes that shape-shifting technology is near on the horizon. And “just decades away we will have something resembling Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak.”

This sums up everything that needs to be said about the “populist” Tea Party. It’s not populist and its values of are antithetical to those of the Boston Tea Party. […]

The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen pointed out a striking contrast Monday between what the Senate Republican leadership and the Senate Democratic leadership say their priorities are. Here’s Senate Minority Leader […]

I found myself in a movie theater this weekend, cooling my heels along with the rest of my tribe as we watched the movie Takers. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be writing […]

Harris practices Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, which teaches patients to take control of nightmares by rehearsing them during the day and changing them into positive scenarios. 90% of Harris’s patients report […]

A novelist and two neuroscientists came by Big Think’s offices this past week. Jonathan Safran Foer, one of the most acclaimed young novelists of the past decade, spoke to us […]

The Tea Party—with its flamboyant supporters and over-the-top rhetoric—makes good copy. It make such good copy that it sometimes gets more attention than its actual influence warrants. But give credit […]

A conversation with the sleep psychologist.

“Hey, Kiddo.” When she was a young girl, Berkeley Reinhold would pick up the phone and hear Andy Warhol greet her with those words. Although he was calling for her […]

Controlling other people’s dreams may be science fiction, but there are ways to control our own dreams, Harris says.

All eyes today are on Capitol Hill as former VP Al Gore testifies before Congress on global warming. Bill Broad’s NY Times’ article last week has launched a new narrative […]

Do you have any bad memories? Traumatic memories come in all shapes and sizes. Some are terrible gut-wrenching ones like being raped, beaten, or shot during combat. Others are based […]

Save yourself the time and effort: parents have much less influence over their children’s personality than we think, says controversial psychologist Judith Rich Harris. 

The identity politics wrapped up in author Sam Harris’ statements at a recent atheist conference here in Washington, DC has sparked a ton of discussion and debate. Paul Kurtz, chair […]

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” may come up for a vote after all. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wants to bring the 2011 defense authorization bill, which contains a provision […]

NPR’s Richard Harris reports on the UN National Security Council’s attempt to recast global warming as really a matter of national and global security. Trinifar has all the details and […]

Many readers will want to check out the debate going on over at Belief.net between best-selling “End of Faith” author Sam Harris and “Conservative Soul” author/Time magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan. […]

Each Monday evening in November, AAAS is sponsoring a series of panel discussions on major issues in science and technology policy. The panels are hosted by NPR reporters Joe Palca […]