Ross Douthat ponders baseball’s decline into sordidness as Roger Clemens becomes “one of the many…superstars credibly accused of using performance-enhancing drugs.”
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Are Americans right to be pessimistic about the prospects of their children being better off economically than they are? Gary Becker examines the grounds for this growing sentiment.
Skype is one of Michael Arrington’s “can’t live without” products but the way people use it is driving him crazy, hence this primer on appropriate Skype etiquette.
The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker blames the media for fearmongering over the ‘Ground Zero mosque’. “For one thing, it’s not at Ground Zero. Also, it isn’t a mosque.”
Notions of the tormented artist and of us being ruled by our moods are unhelpful and outdated today, especially in the field of mental health. Tom Wootton explains why.
The New Yorker examines Churchill’s real legacy and finds he was a “Hamlet in reverse”, as well as the greatest modern instance of the romantic-conservative temperament in power.rn
Financial reforms will only work — and prevent disasters — if they take into account human nature and disincentivize greed. The latest proposals fall far short, warns Neal Gabler.
“How is it that we have we learned that when our phone buzzes with a message we MUST respond?” It’s time to question how our digital identities impact on our true selves.
This past week, a number of top experts stopped by the Big Think offices for a video interview. Among them were lawyer and Innocience Project co-founder Barry Scheck, child and […]
According to a new study by scientists at the Astromaterials Research Science Directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, “Mud volcanoes themselves are an indicator of a fluid-rich subsurface, and they […]
Last week I posted somewhat optimistically about media reports suggesting a rebirth for independent bookstores. In reply, below is a guest contribution from my colleague Paul D’Angelo, a professor of […]
Entomologist and National Geographic writer/photographer Mark Moffett knows a lot about bugs. Having studied marauder ants under renowned insect biologist Edward O. Wilson at Harvard, and then gone on to […]
How are cutting-edge conspicuous consumers blowing their excess cash? Fantasy fish tanks, according to the New York Times. The Home and Garden section devoted hundreds of words to the “six-figure […]
Wind turbines are more likely to prompt an association with the Northern California hills, where wind farms grace the vast landscape with their unseemly efficiency, than with the hustle-and-bustle of […]
We really are undergoing a clash of civilizations, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says. Hirsi Ali argues that political scientist Samuel Huntington was right when he wrote in 1993 that future conflicts […]
“A new kind of chlorophyll that catches sunlight from just beyond the red end of the visible light spectrum has been discovered.” The discovery could help advance bio-fuel research.
An agriculture expect says a relatively simple solution could provide food security to sub-Saharan Africa: roads. More paved roads would bring rural communities out of economic isolation.
“In a Spiegel interview, Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass talks about why he doesn’t fear death and why he thinks the Brothers Grimm had ‘oral sex with vowels’.”
“I still think that in going the way it has gone, policy debate has coarsened itself.” Mark Oppenheimer at Slate laments the exaggerated competition in once-civil team sports.
Despite widespread skepticism over the ensuing renewal of peace talks between Israel and Palestine, The Economist says the negotiations are more promising than Bush’s attempts.
Making $70 million in just the last five months, author James Patterson is America’s, and the world’s, richest author. The catch? He employs a team of five people to write his books.
“New technology could allow people to dictate letters and search the internet simply by thinking, according to researchers at Intel who are behind a mind-reading computer project.”
“Rising temperatures have helped blunt plants’ ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere, according to a study published yesterday in Science.” Is it a threshold in the warming cycle?
The stimulus versus austerity debate is culturally relative, says an economist for The Guardian. What matters most is that each country reassure its entrepreneurs that demand will rise in the future.
What is the relation between money and power? Will China use the profits of its growing economy for peaceful domestic purposes or to build a large military like the U.S. and U.K. did?
Building on yesterday’s post, today I examine some more implications of the claim made by The Times of London that it found the names of Afghan informants in the secret […]
Charlatan is one of my top two goat-related works of narrative non-fiction. Brock Pope’s gripping account of the rise and fall of one of the most flamboyant and deadly quacks […]
Here is a puzzle: if promiscuity has increased over the past century and if the cause of that increase was really a fall in the risk of pregnancy, then why […]
Big Think has called August “The Month of Thinking Dangerously” and served up one radical idea each day in the Dangerous Ideas blog. The ideas started off dangerously enough, with […]
“Obama has promised to halve the the US deficit by 2013, but nobody seems to know how he’ll manage it.” Prospect Magazine on the uncertain future of the American current account.