“Greece is about to learn whether a modern state can withdraw entitlements that people have come to take for granted but which the government no longer can afford.”
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An iconoclastic economist at Cambridge University has likened free-market capitalism to that of the brainwashed characters in the film The Matrix, unwitting pawns in a fake reality.
“Any gamer, or parent of a gamer, will know the feeling. There’s a boss that just can’t be defeated.” A gamer and father on whether discovering a game’s secrets online is cheating.
“We all know that it’s good to be honest, generous, self-controlled, tenacious, and thrifty, but it’s the doing that dogs us.” A sociologist on how to inculcate the youth with lessons on virtue.
Megham Daum wanted to avoid writing about Eat Pray Love but couldn’t hold back comment on the ostensible spiritual project that has become a major marketing brand of its own.
The secularist Center for Inquiry waded into the Park51 controversy in earnest yesterday, with disastrous results. I love CFI and I’ve been working with them for years, so it pains […]
“A new study suggests that prayer can indeed guide people away from adulterous behavior.” The Economist explains that it is God who most effectively reproaches infidelity.
“Why did our ancestors eat each other? Simple: They were hungry.” Discovery News reports on findings of cannibalism that refute explanatory theories like ritualism or starvation.
The world’s top mathematics prize that outshines even the Nobel, the Fields Medal ceremony in India contrasts the romanticized and turbulent life of mathematical revolutionaries.
“It’s possible to demean oneself by sinking to the level of those who promiscuously accept any sort of apology.” The New Yorker meditates on the politics of giving and accepting apologies.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is laying claim to Internet technologies now widely used by Google, Facebook and Ebay. The Wall Street Journal reports that patent litigation is on the rise.
A new video montage of live news reports broadcast between 9:02 and 9:03 a.m. on 11 September 2001 captures the first utterances of rhetoric that define the 9/11 narrative.
Somali fisherman have made a conscious career change to piracy with Kalashnikovs and RPGs replacing fishing poles. Stanford’s Hoover Institution looks at the burgeoning industry.
“If gold were the basis of the world economy, each ounce would be worth about $6,000.” The Christian Science Monitor asks what it would take for currency to return to the gold standard.
A field not traditionally considered profitable by men, women are taking the Pakistani art market by storm. Female artists and curators and gaining international exposure as a result.
A Columbia professor of law and economics says the U.S. is idealizing manufacturing as a solution to the economic crisis, but that service and information industries perform just as well.
On August 23rd, the Public Broadcasting System launched a new web portal for promoting the arts. PBS Artsspearheads an overall expansion of arts programming to take place over the next […]
Today’s economic news was not good. The Commerce Department lowered its estimate of second quarter growth from an annual rate of 2.4% to an annual rate of 1.6%. That’s down […]
One of my enduring memories of New York City right after 9/11 was the absence or religious or racial violence. As we stared up at the planeless sky or across […]
A novelist and two neuroscientists came by Big Think’s offices this past week. Jonathan Safran Foer, one of the most acclaimed young novelists of the past decade, spoke to us […]
It’s often said that children are the designers of humanity’s future. International research consultancy Latitude and ReadWriteWeb decided to take the adage literally, asking children to envision the future of […]
As we discussed in the previous Going Mental posts, some of the most fundamental mechanisms of the human brain remain a mystery to scientists. Consciousness, intelligence, and sleep are so […]
In a now famous skit from Saturday Night Live, William Shatner told a room full of Trekkies to “get a life.” Like Shatner, highbrows tend to dismiss fan culture as […]
Most people consider anonymous sex in public places to be a crude, rude and immoral act. But “all that is rude ought not to be civilized with death,” as Walter […]
If you’re not a computer programmer, the name Bjarne Stroustrup might not mean that much to you. The creator of the coding language C++ isn’t exactly a household name. But […]
Double blind peer-review in science and other fields has been the norm for decades. Now some scholars, as featured at the NY Times this week, are arguing that peer-review needs […]
I went to a wake earlier this week for the grandmother of a very close friend of mine. I had only seen his grandmother a few times in all the […]
Last week we talked about promiscuity and I gave you a chance to take a test to measure what psychologists call “sociosexuality”—which I referred to as promiscuity. When you took […]
A groundbreaking 1981 study that showed that it is not our physical state that limits us, but our mindset about our own limits, is set to feature in a movie starring Jennifer Aniston.
Facing a slow-motion food crisis the world should learn from Brazil, which reacted to its farm crisis with boldness, expanding production through science, not subsidies.