All Articles

Google versus Facebook. Silicon Valley versus Hollywood. Wall Street versus Main Street. Increasingly, the rivalries and alliances that define our lives have nothing to do with kings, queens, or Congress. What we’re witnessing is a fundamental shift in the way our society is organized.

Information is power. The Internet has made it possible to share and spread information faster than ever before. Unprecedented levels of access to information means that democracy is bound to take root and flower in even the most authoritarian corners of the world — right? Not necessarily, says MacKinnon.

What is the Big Idea? Best Buy, Pepsi, General Electric, Intel, Phillips and Nestle. What do these multinational companies have in common? They’ve all penetrated China’s retail market, but that […]

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is turning to individual citizen-scientists to help fine-tune its complex algorithms that search for patterns in noise received from space. 

New scientific manuscripts, political thoughts and love letters written by Einstein have been made public by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which the physicist helped to found. 

The consistency of individual autonomy, as Mill outlined, indicates that just as we can live as we wish (with certain constraints), we ought to be able to die as we […]

Following the news stories of Maurizio Seracini’s search for The Battle of Anghiari, a “lost” 1505 fresco by Leonardo da Vinci that Seracini believes is hidden behind Giorgio Vasari’s 1563 […]

Ten years after 9/11, the National Security Agency (NSA) is close to putting the finishing touches on what will be the single biggest spy center in the country. According to […]

Kadam Morten Clausen is a Buddhist teacher in the New Kadampa tradition, a modern, Western tradition grounded in Tibetan Buddhism.  Here he discusses how Buddhism differs from the Judeo-Christian religions. […]

Editor’s Note: Dennis N.T. Perkins is an explorer and author of Leading at The Edge, Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition. “For scientific discovery give me Scott; […]

Would-be philosopher and founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman realized at a young age that other people give meaning to life. He took up studying software and rest, as they say, is history. 

The world’s most outspoken peer-to-peer file host, the Pirate Bay, says to avoid being shutdown by Hollywood, it will host servers on drones floating above international waters. 

As spring arrives and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City returns to public visibility many people will be asking the self-proclaimed ‘occupiers’ what their point is. U.S. […]

Gloria Feldt is the former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power.

What is the Big Idea? Tacked on to the end of the lengthy Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed new government safeguards after the U.S. financial crisis, there is an unusual provision […]

How do we develop the aptitude to separate spam from knowledge? James Lawrence Powell tells Big Think you need to be “your own spam filter.” 

Trayvon Martin, from the evidence we can see so far, was not guilty of anything more than being an aimless child on his way home. His death at the hands […]

The Internet will surely revolutionize tomorrow’s jobs, right? While the information revolution has given us better technology, essential human qualities like patience will remain, well, essential. 

Thanks to the Internet, universities no longer hold a monopoly on information, says the Open Course Ware Consortium, which is working to make more college courses available for free. 

A new psychological paper draws the first direct correlations between Facebook use and narcissistic tendencies including grandiose exhibitionism and entitlement/exploitativeness. 

      Here’s some bad news for those of you who like to think you can think rationally about risk. You can’t. You know all those thoughtfully considered views you have […]

After writing my previous post chastising the National Atheist Party, I thought (and hoped) that I’d be done writing about Reason Rally drama. Alas, it was not to be. Apparently, […]

James Cameron’s films may all cover wildly different terrain — the distant, futuristic planet Pandora in Avatar, an ill-fated Edwardian-era passenger liner in Titanic, and an alien-embattled underwater oil platform in […]

State legislatures tend to make national headlines when they vote on divisive social issues like mandatory ultrasounds or stage epic battles over the status of public-sector unions. But in the […]

Political ideologies on the left and the right get confused when it comes to enacting urbanization policies, unfortunately, to the detriment of those who live in the city and suburbs.

   

Baratunde Thurston’s “swine flu experiment” was a brilliant, well-timed satire on media frenzy, but it’s also a masterclass in the creative use of social media. 

In a world defined by change, says Baratunde Thurston, you need a sense of mission that’s much bigger than the desk you happen to be sitting behind at any moment. 

Cash and coins account for only three percent of the Swedish economy, about half that of the US and Britain. Some predict that cash will disappear from Sweden in as little as 20 years. 

What is the Big Idea? While Israel and Iran teeter on the brink of war, two Israeli graphic designers decided to reach out to Iranian citizens by creating a slogan […]