Theodore Dalrymple is not sure that snobbery is actually a vice. “Everyone needs someone to look down on, and the psychological need is the more urgent the more meritocratic a society becomes,” he writes.
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A new survey finds that while people around the world firmly support equal rights for men and women, many believe men should still get preference in jobs and education.
“Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism,” writes Ron Rosenbaum. “Agnosticism is … opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.”
A new concept aircraft from Lockheed Martin could pave the way for supersonic flights over land by shushing the sonic booms created by the planes.
“What would you get if you crossed a whale with a shark?” asks Sid Perkins. “Maybe something like Leviathan melvillei, a long-extinct, hypercarnivorous whale with teeth longer than any T. rex ever had.”
Edward Tenner wonders whether business models, like major engineering projects and government agencies, have their own failure timetables.
Opening my daily Treehugger news email just now, I noticed that headline: ‘Dinner in the Dumpster’. Oh, I thought, how fun! An article about freeganism! In fact, the article at […]
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then John Scarlett Davis must have been the sincerest flatterer in all of England in 1829. In the exhibition Seeing Double: Portraits, […]
Is World Cup soccer moving away from the sort of team=country nationalism that leads to flare-ups like 1969’s “soccer war” between El Salvador and Honduras? It’s often remarked that the […]
Having now closed out the first six months of the year, it seems like a good time to look back on Big Think’s 10 Most Popular Videos of the First […]
Meanwhile, let another Rolling Stone reporter take your attention, for a different if no less compelling reason: a meditation on a writer we miss, David Foster Wallace. In the latest […]
Raw Story breathlessly reports that a researcher is experimenting with dangerous drugs to stop girls from growing up to be lesbians: “Afraid your daughter may be queer, or not be […]
Science fiction writer Catherine Asaro is also a ballet dancer and a math teacher who believes thatphysics and dancing are much more closely related than you might think
Harvard Business School Professor Ranjay Gulati doesn’t buy it when businesses today say they are “customer-centric”—because any company will say that they are. “It’s a platitude,” says Gulati. “There’s confusion […]
Albert Einstein once said something very profound. He said the Universe could have been chaotic, random and ugly—and yet we have this gorgeous synthesis at the origin of the Universe […]
Amit Chatterjee, the CEO and founder of Hara Technologies, consults with companies all across the country about how to go green. He stopped by Big Think recently to talk about […]
Cities’ ability to store heat means they are typically warmer than their surrounding areas. Given climate change, this could mean the end of cooler nights and more frequent heat waves.
Despite the Cold War mystique surrounding alleged Russian spies living within the U.S. under “deep cover”, Al Jazeera reports that spying is an eternal art, valuable to a nation no matter the epoch.
Garrison Keillor extrapolates the three stages of life from three generations casually standing on a street corner: Defenselessness, Cluelessness and finally Helplessness.
While surveillance that results in a speeding ticket may curb our wayward morals, Internet surveillance has no such benefit. Beware the illusion of your public persona, says The Economist.
Slate recalls Marshal McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool media to say that ink on paper is perceived differently than type on screen. One, therefore, cannot completely replace the other.
The struggle to overcome Tourette’s syndrome or even severe stuttering increases cognitive control in the prefrontal cortex because individuals suppress purely reflexive behavior.
“Apple’s legions of devotees should brace their hipster selves for an inevitable fall from grace,” says Dennis Kneale at the Daily Beast after sampling Google’s yet-unreleased smartphone.
“Those who perpetrate wars of aggression invariably invent moral justifications to allow themselves and the citizens of the aggressor state to feel good and noble about themselves,” says Glen Greenwald.
MIT engineers have completed a four year project to develop a car with foldable wings, in other words, a flying car. The vehicle is powered by unleaded gasoline and goes for $200,000.
“Do we inflate the menace of Islamic Jihad in order to justify the war in Afghanistan?” Robert Wright wonders if our simplification of Muslim motives squeezes relevant facts out of picture.
Grist’s Umbra Fisk (the website’s point person for green living questions) recently revisited the toilet issue and doled out some very important water-saving tips: sink a half-gallon of water in […]
“It’s time we Met,” reads several posters in the latest marketing campaign of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A recent piece by Peter Aspden titled “Met […]
Elena Kagan’s confirmation should hold about as much suspense as the third presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain back in the fall of 2008. As in absolutely none. […]
Last month, I had the honor of greeting my colleague, Stephen Hawking, famed cosmologist, in New York, where he was being honored by the World Science Festival for all his scientific […]