50/50 is a pretty profound movie. It’s also as perfectly cast as MONEYBALL, apparently because they were cast by the same person. MONEYBALL, of course, is about the attempt to […]
All Articles
“By honoring the lives of those we admire, we make our own values known. Perhaps more clearly than words ever could.” -Steve Jobs This is hardly the most well-known Steve […]
Was the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki legal? Was it wise and did it make Americans safer?
My recent post on the godlessness of the Constitution has attracted some attention. Over the weekend, I came across a reply from another of Big Think’s bloggers: Peter Lawler, a […]
Crowdsourcing began as a legitimate tool to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to solve complex business and scientific challenges. Unfortunately, these very same techniques are increasingly being adopted by the criminal underground for nefarious purposes.
Stocks jumped on France and Germany’s pledge to solve the European banking crisis but German observers tell a different story. Banks are full of bankrupt government bonds, they say.
For the moment, the U.S. has cornered the market on drone warfare. But this won’t last forever. What will conflict look like when warring countries fight each other with drones?
College in a Nutskull is a wickedly entertaining collection of bloopers from college students’ exam books. It includes this gem of unwitting brilliance about post-millennial marriage: “By being intelligent and […]
College in a Nutskull is a wickedly entertaining collection of bloopers from college students’ exam books. It includes this gem of unwitting brilliance about post-millennial marriage: “By being intelligent and […]
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf insists he knew nothing of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts inside his country. Let’s hope he’s lying. The alternative would be much worse.
Though the Bush administration never admitted it, its tax cuts would almost certainly push the incomes of rich and poor further apart. As incomes became more widely dispersed, the gap […]
While other Arab states have downgraded ties with Syria, Iraq has moved in the opposite direction, hosting official visits, signing business pacts and offering political support.
At least 24 people have been killed and dozens more injured in clashes between Catholic demonstrators and military police outside the state television building in central Cairo.
Facebook has largely won the war of the online identity platform, however identity online creates big markets and there are still large openings for a secondary mainstream player and probably […]
I love Product Design. As consumer tech has matured, I think the most interesting challenges have largely moved from pure technology problems in to more general interface problems – helping […]
In an illuminating recent paper, “Capitalism in the Classical and High Liberal Tradition” [$$$], University of Pennsylvania philosopher Samuel Freeman seeks to offer some justification for the secondary status conferred […]
The title to the new collaborative blog is “Education Recoded.” We picked this title for a variety of reasons, but most importantly we feel it is an apt description of […]
President Obama is asking his supporters to tweet at Congress to pass his jobs proposal. His campaign website has a tool that matches your ZIP code to your Members of […]
While psychologists have cornered the market on what it means to be happy, other fields are slowly examining metrics that might give us a new perspective on the age-old pursuit.
I’ve often written about the moral system I advocate, which I’ve dubbed universal utilitarianism. Although people have a broad range of individual preferences, human nature is, in general, fixed and […]
Like many others, I was not very enthusiastic about the launch event of the iPhone 4S. The expectations where simply too high, and the whole event seemed to lack the […]
Evidence shows that heavy alcohol use modifies the structure and physiology of the brain, although the extent of recovery after years of abstinence is remains uncertain.
Ever wonder why some people seem completely spaced out? It turns out half the normal population has a fold in the brain that makes their memories significantly less accurate.
Metaphor is extremely powerful: By washing, people can remove a sense of immorality, unlucky feelings or doubt about a decision, say University of Michigan psychologists.
Given the increasingly complacently atheistic tone of many of the BIG THINKERS, I thought I’d introduce some realism about our Constitution’s silence on God. My position will be, of course, somewhere […]
Education isn’t magic. It is the wisdom wrung from failure. People learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. But why do some people learn faster than others?
What should be done to Wall Street in the aftermath of the financial crisis? This question has lingered for some time, without much action being taken by Washington, until eventually […]
Having concluded that screening does not save lives, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force will recommend that healthy men forgo being screened with the familiar PSA blood test.
A small but growing vanguard of people, mostly with rare diseases and cancers, have come to better understand their condition through sequencing their families’ genome.