The New Yorker was my introduction to contemporary literary fiction years ago when I was a pre-teenager looking for something outside of the confines of my small town public library. […]
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“As counterintuitive as it may be to say so, oil is a green fuel, while ‘green’ fuels aren’t,” says Jonah Goldberg, who makes a sobering and conservative assessment of America’s need for black gold.
Naomi Klein takes stock of the Gulf oil spill and finds a deeper meaning beneath mechanical failure on Deepwater Horizon: the West’s cultural hubris in thinking it can control Nature.
For the first time, researchers have cataloged forty distinct signals orangutans use to communicate with each other, including gestures for “I want to play” and “Give it to me”.
Art critic Karen Wright charts her run-ins with English painter David Hockney over the last ten years. The prolific painter has taken to photography and even drawing on his iPhone.
Ten years after sequencing the entire human genome, some call the achievement a false start; The Economist calls it only the beginning of a marathon that has begun to revolutionize biology.
In the wake of Arizona’s controversial law empowering police to stop and detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally, Arizona Republicans are working on legislation that would deny […]
“I think I’m beginning to know something about painting,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir said on the day he died as he turned away from a still life he’d been working on and […]
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. […]
Erik Rasmussen, founder of the Copenhagen Climate Council, doesn’t try to pretend that COP 15 was anything but a failure. The talks concluded without a global climate treaty, and Rasmussen […]
Last year, betacup extended a challenge to the creative community to rethink the coffee cup from a sustainable angle that eliminates the 58 million disposable cups America tosses in the […]
At what point does graphic violence and sex turn a literary work into pornography? What are the merits of a story filled with imagery so shocking that it forces some […]
Bard College President Leon Botstein believes that for about half of the high school students in the U.S., college should begin at age 16. “We should have a system that […]
Following in the spirit of U.S. tech mogul Bill Gates, billionaire Azim Premji, the Chairman of Wipro and the second richest man in India, announced recently that he plans to […]
TV, long considered a ‘wasteland’, is enjoying a widely acknowledged creative renaissance at the same time as movies are striking out. Joseph Childers examines why.
‘Student athletes’ are now quasi-mercenaries, performing to boost schools’ bottom lines, argues James O’Toole, who calls for moral leadership from the top institutions.
With the Ronnie Lee Gardner execution making news, Margot Sanger-Katz finds the (limited) research suggesting that the firing squad is actually a pretty good way to go.
“Will Iceland get from bits what Switzerland gets from bank accounts?” the Economist’s Babbage blog asks as Iceland moves closer to being a digital media haven.
Research and a TV program are debunking the myth that fathers who enjoy a close bond with their children are a modern phenomena, reports Steve Humphries.
“Some good may have come out of the astonishing ice loss (in 2007),…the Arctic science community came together to try a new approach to climate science,” writes Alexis Madrigal.
As experts go public with claims that the entertainment industry is exaggerating piracy losses, Ben Jones argues for the industry to put up (real data) or shut up.
German commentators think Barack Obama is in danger of turning into an idealistic, one-term president like Jimmy Carter, explains Michael Scott Moore.
“(Richard) Dawkins and co. are appalled by the belief in God, (Christopher) Hitchens is far more appalled by the idea that anyone would want to obey Him,” observes Ross Douthat.
“When you need to have a meeting, have a meeting…The rest of the time, do the work wherever you like.” Seth Godin lists the reasons that the office is (nearly) dead.
Two days ago, San Francisco mandated that all cell phones bear a new label: amount of radiation emitted. A sort of calorie-labeling for health-conscious tech consumers. The science is arguably […]
Last year’s H1N1 pandemic may have been milder than global health experts had feared, but this is no cause for complacency. Researchers in Hong Kong reported today in the online […]
Over the past few years, bike-sharing systems have gained popularity around the world, experimenting with different models of building a sustainable mode of alternative transportation – from the ad-supported models […]
Jarrett Barrios, the president of GLAAD, was in Big Think’s offices this afternoon to talk about some of the issues involved with gay identity and the challenge of being “out.” […]
Last week, I wrote that Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) opponent, Sharron Angle, would have a hard time appealing to moderate voters. Her views are so far out of the mainstream—at […]
While many people think the U.S.’s military superiority is vital to world security, all of the money and energy that we spend on it may be seriously damaging our economy […]