All Articles

For the May/June issue of Canada’s Policy Options magazine, I contributed an article adapted from my Spring 2013 Shorenstein Center paper examining the career of environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben.  With anticipation building over Obama’s […]

Ron Miller has painted the planets as if they were the same distance from Earth as the Moon, in order to demonstrate their size.

I didn’t want to write this, but then I don’t want to write most of the things I do: I shouldn’t need to tell anyone why thinking gay marriage will […]

At the New Scientist magazine last week, I was asked to provide an analysis of UK environment minister Owen Paterson’s announcement that his government would seek to change the conversation about  food […]

In the hours following the deaths of more than 50 Egyptians in Cairo earlier today there were wildly divergent accounts of what actually happened. Here is a summary, from Wendell […]

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, has found Mexico to be the world’s most obese country with an obesity rate of 32.8 percent, a full point higher than the United States’.

A month or two ago I wrote about the rampant proliferation of “hotness” ratings for women where they have no business or place. Even the most accomplished women, ranging from […]

An Australian restaurateur has proposed that the most commonly used word in the English language get a symbol of its very own, one that’s borrowed from the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet: Ћ.

Bryan Sykes on how he became enthralled with nature and natural history. 

An orchestral symphony has a lot of instruments, but you tend to concentrate on the soloists. 

In honor of Bastille Day, we are looking at five French ideas and how they have influenced the world. 

Through the worst portions of the global financial crisis, the price of gold skyrocketed from $300 per ounce to $1,900 as investors looked for a foothold in the rocky economic terrain.

The second annual Maker Camp, a free online program targeting kids and teens already bored with summer break, started Monday (July 8). Among other things, it promises to teach campers how to make 30 new things in six weeks.

Perhaps the most powerful contribution of cognitive psychology to human understanding has been its careful mapping out of the many ways in which we self-deceive.  Our minds are expert confabulators, […]

Walter Russell Mead, one of the most expert bloggers around, gives the most realistic explanation I’ve seen on how MOOCS—those massive online courses—will affect higher education. They won’t, in fact, […]

Extrinsic motivators like status and money tend to be back-end loaded, they tend to be delayed. And so, as Robert Kaplan points out, we need short-term rewards. 

Taking a clue from the mobile computing industry, major automakers are either designing or thinking about designing customized apps that a driver can download from their car’s monitor.

The coup that ousted Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood suggests that Islam still has no stable footing on which to shoulder the responsibilities of modern governance, according to professor Olivier Roy.

“You can’t live or die every day thinking about redemption,” a self-reflective Eliot Spitzer told Big Think in 2010.

For many career seekers, “follow your passion” can be a terrifying piece of advice, mainly because the word passion conjures up images of intense, frenzied activity better suited to an […]

The increasing desertification of Africa, thought to be a product of climate change, creates resource shortages which in turn give rise to armed militas intent on controlling their distribution.

The technology that will enable vehicles to drive themselves has shown much promise. So much promise, in fact, that industry experts believe private drivers as well as industry will inevitably adopt them.

Talent isn’t everything. In fact, some of the most robust findings to come out of developmental psychology over the past decades have identified self-control – the ability to harness, train, […]

Theo Caldwell recently appeared on FOX, telling Tucker Carlson that he could no longer make fun of Canada as “our socialist little buddy to the north.” 

There is no ironclad guarantee that signing up to hurtle your body at 500+ mph several miles above the ground will result in safe passage to your destination.

Resilience can help your life in a general way to be more productive. 

One factor that is involved in resilience is having a moral compass, a set of beliefs that few things can shatter. 

This image was taken with a 50 mm lens by members of Expedition 36 aboard the International Space Station, the latest in a series of stunning images released to the public.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—truer (and more gender, class, and race specific) words were never written by a group of rich, white, […]

            Control. Without a sense of control, we feel less safe. With a sense of control – whether we actually have that control or not – we feel safer. A […]