The English language is infamous for its difficult spelling, and while no immediate changes appear on the horizon, reformists of the language continue their quest to change English spelling.
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“Equal opportunity is essential but not enough,” said LBJ forty five years ago to inaugurate an era of affirmative action. His words ring true today when the income gap is widening.
We all live with the newness of technology and the oldness of our social customs, so what happens when death unites the two? What happens to your online self when you die?
Is evil still a relevant concept in our increasingly secular times or is it too mystical to be discussed rationally? What are the different forms of evil and how do we combat them?
Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) has turned out to be the moderate, relatively independent Republican he said he would be. In other words he turned out not to be what many […]
God bless whistleblowers. Graham Rayman and the Village Voice obtained hundreds of hours of covertly recorded audio from one disgruntled Bed-Stuy cop: Two years ago, a police officer in a […]
In the Matrix trilogy, God is portrayed as a software Architect. The fact that the first movie was released in 1999 is appropriate since software code had begun to exert […]
Right now our most advanced robots are not quite as smart as we would want them to be. One of the most popular—Honda’s humanoid robot, Asimo—is quite sophisticated but you won’t […]
What happens when an artist loses his or her creative currency – the capacity for self-expression? That’s exactly what happened to legendary Los Angeles graffiti artist Tony Quan, a.k.a. Tempt […]
Whether you call it the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” or the “June Fourth Incident” (as it’s known in the People’s Republic of China), what happened in Beijing 21 years ago today […]
Nobel Laureate Bill Phillips stopped by Big Think today to talk about his work in laser cooling, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1997 and is the reason that […]
According the latest government numbers, the economy added 431,000 jobs in May. It’s the biggest single month increase in employment in a decade and the fifth month in a row […]
Charlie Riedel of the Associated Press deserves a Pulitzer Prize for his photos of the oil-slicked pelicans of the Louisiana coast. It would be an unconventional choice. Human subjects have […]
The defining image of the BP oil spill is a suspiciously low resolution video feed from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The much maligned Huffington Post seems to […]
When it comes to business sustainability, do we need top-down or bottom-up approaches? Erik Rasmussen, CEO of the think tank Monday Morning and founder of the Copenhagen Climate Council, believes […]
Geoff Jones, a Harvard Business School professor, knows everything there is to know about mascara. He’s an expert on the beauty industry, a sector that dates back to ancient civilization. […]
We live in an intriguing era of self-disclosure. Tonight, in New York City, the World Science Festival features a panel discussion called Strangers in the Mirror: “What’s it like to […]
“Intuition can help us make good decisions without expending the time and effort needed to calculate the optimal decision, but shortcuts sometimes lead to dead ends,” says The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The L.A. Times comes out swinging against baseball’s “halfhearted embrace of technology”. The Galarraga case sparks new calls for technology to double-check humans.
One of the world’s foremost art collectors, Charles Saatchi famously refuses to be interviewed, but here he answers some questions put to him via email by The Daily Beast.
Movie violence against women has long been a staple of mainstream film-making but is becoming ever more forensically detailed, claims a troubled Natasha Walter.
Michael J. Formica says taking personal responsibility is essential in overcoming addiction but systems like AA allow its abdication.
Corruption slang can sound cute in foreign tongues. Euphemisms may belittle cross-border bribes but they are still illegal, warn James G. Tillen and Sonia M. Delmans.
Cleopatra is the selling point but the resurrection of a long-lost world is the strength of a powerful new exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
As India wrestles with the politically-sensitive question of including caste in its 2011 census, P. Sainath looks at a once strong anti-caste reform movement.
What should happen to the former Stasi HQ? How much of a glimpse into history, and whose interpretation of it, should it offer?
Mass shootings are mercifully rare in Britain. “Gunman goes on killing spree” is a newspaper headline that one might expect to read every ten years or so. But none of […]
As advice columnists go, Emiy Yoffe of “Dear Prudence” is usually relatively compassionate. Today, however, Prudie was shockingly cruel to a young woman* grieving the loss of her best friend: […]
The official unemployment rate remains almost 10%. That in itself is nearly as high as it has been since the early 80s and is plenty bad enough. But it nevertheless […]
Astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute, stopped by Big Think today to talk about the question she’s spent her career trying to answer: Is there intelligent life on […]