One theme that consistently emerges in Teju Cole’s work is an interest in creating space, through literature, for those bits of real, complex experience that can find their expression nowhere else.
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The all-knowing device used in the TV program Star Trek has been brought to real life by cognitive scientist Peter Jansen, who equipped the machine with an impressive array of sensors.
A start up backed by a Skype co-founder is giving away free smartphone covers that provide about a gigabyte of free wireless per month. Internet is a right, not a privilege, says the company.
In this interview with Big Think, Henry Rollins talks about how important it is to travel, and how his time on the ground around the world has allowed him to connect more deeply with the issues he cares about and break stereotypes while doing it.
What’s the Big Idea? Steve Mahan is 95 percent blind. And yet he was able to get into a car and drive a pre-programmed route from his California home to […]
Unwrapping the paintings for our “Abstraction” exhibition, I had a shock or at least a wonderful surprise. I called to my associates and said, “Wow, who of you managed to […]
The very technology that keeps us constantly connected to work can also create a new understanding of labor in the modern age. The no-hour work week means using technology humanely.
Will moving money to digital devices widen the digital divide or provide a way for everyone to participate in a new economy that will run on exciting new digital innovations?
How soon until you can roll up your computer screen like a newspaper? Two recent developments will make computer screens and e-reading devices flexible enough to bend.
My previous post on the term “mansplaining” was turning into a zombie thread, so I had to drive a stake through its heart. But there’s more that needs to be […]
The duality is right there in her name: Francesca Woodman. Woodman, daughter of two successful artists and a promising photographer herself, cherished childhood memories of family trips to Tuscany and […]
Deep water exploration is the hip thing to do these days, whether you’re James Cameron hanging out with “extremophiles” in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean, or if you’re […]
Think the private sector has a monopoly on innovation and government is just hopeless bureaucracy? Not DARPA. It’s the agency that invented the Internet and flies at Mach 20.
Researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, are developing a suite of satellites armed with powerful lasers to change the course of asteroids that threaten Earth.
I can still vividly remember reading, back in 2001, the New York Times Magazinewrite-up on the release of The Corrections. It began: Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. […]
The amino acids that can be found inside comets, which are also the building blocks of life, sustain the heat and pressure of an impact, say researchers, and even form peptide bonds.
Every Wednesday, Dr. Michio Kaku answers reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and […]
Majorities around the world believe that the climate of the earth is changing, that human activity is contributing to those changes, that the changes are happening so fast they […]
by Daphne Muller At the center of the debate surrounding the legality of George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin is the question of whether or not Zimmerman uttered a racial […]
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS telescope have studied over 100 nearby red dwarf stars over the last six years. 40 percent of these common stars were observed to wobble, a […]
What is the Big Idea? Back in the 16th century, a group of rural and urban weavers who worked in the Black Forest mountain range of Germany formed a guild […]
What’s the Big Idea? Sometimes you have to be bad in the service of being good, say coauthors and cofounders Frances Frei (a professor at Harvard Business School) and Anne […]
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, the 20 year old Iraqi founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement – a forum for the discussion of rational […]
It looks like the Supreme Court may well declare unconstitutional at least the “mandate” part of “Obamacare.” This astute observer explains why Justice Kennedy’s understanding of the relevant issue makes […]
You might think the debate over the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act is a classic confrontation between state power and individual liberty, big government liberalism versus minimal state […]
One of my favorite books on leadership is The Future of Management by Gary Hamel. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so. You can read my […]
The super-Earths discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission may be better at supporting life than Earth itself, says the Harvard astronomer who coined the term super-Earth.
When density perturbations in space cause it to collapse, black holes are created in a range of sizes. Some are extremely small and could pass straight through the Earth.
There is only one measure of time that matters to the current Internet generation: the here and now. The Cult of Now is influencing everything that we do and every […]
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