Culture & Religion
All Stories
Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate of the United States, told Big Think that the first poem she ever wrote, at the age of 10 or 11, was about Easter: “In […]
New U.S. airport security measures mark the end of broad national and racial profiling in favor of intelligence-based screening criteria.
Some of the most innovative baseball teams have rebuilt their teams this year around an ascendant strategy that defense is the key to victory. But can nifty glovework please homer-hungry fans?
Dorothy Parker’s popularity may have been part of the reason that academia was slow to take up her poetry, writes R. S. Gwynn. But now even feminists have taken her into the literary canon.
Has the culture of “white 20-somethings dressed in skinny jeans and lumberjack shirts, and wearing thick-rimmed glasses” begun its inevitable decline?
Twenty-one years ago, the term “mommy track” was born. Angie Kim thinks the concept “needn’t be the dull fate feminists predicted — and, increasingly, it’s not.”
Edith Grossman found trying to translate Cervantes’ 400-year old masterpiece “Don Quixote” into modern English somewhat… Quixotic.
Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham came by Big Think a few weeks ago to discuss cooking and all of its evolutionary implications. Did you know that cooking is a huge influence […]
As a kid, I loved my oversized reproduction of Action Comics #1, the June 1938 issue in which Superman, the first true superhero, burst onto the scene and changed the […]
Researchers Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong have found that exposure to organic and environmentally friendly products leads people to act more altruistically.
There’s a new anti-snobbery food movement in France called Le Fooding, which focuses on sensual cooking, that evidently wants to take over America as well.
“We want to make architecture that people like to use,” said Kazuyo Sejima, who with partner Ryue Nishizawa won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize yesterday. “The jury somehow appreciated our […]
Death challenges the strength of any family. A suicide can tear a family apart. Art dealer Carl David, fourth in a line of a four-generation family owned art gallery, recounts […]
Then you’ll want to learn from Bill Brown, professor of English and the visual arts at the University of Chicago and the creator of “thing theory.” What is thing theory? […]
Judith Thurman’s Talk of the Town piece in this week’s New Yorker details how an unknown Italian “journalist” fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham (the odd selection of those […]
Michelangelo spent most of his life on a massive guilt trip. When he painted The Crucifixion of St. Peter in 1550 (pictured), he inserted not one, but two self-portraits. To […]
Sadly, the memorials to the art of Andrew Wyeth since his death early last year have been few. I personally find it difficult to understand the lack of response to […]
The JFK library in Boston will soon display a letter J.D. Salinger wrote to Ernest Hemingway from a German hospital during the Second World War.
Who are the artists that people who know nothing about art know? Van Gogh? Michelangelo? Picasso? For museums trying to bring traffic through their doors, drawing in the non-art lover […]
We tend to think of work done on assignment as being somehow cheaper than work springing entirely from the mind of the artist. Art on demand never strikes us as […]
If only Miss Marple had been a bisexual biker with multiple piercings and a criminal record like the heroine in Stieg Larsson’s bestselling novel “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
With tablet notebooks and Kindles changing the way we read books, new technology is threatening the way we respond to the text by using “eye tracking” to keep our interest.
The Wall Street Journal’s drama critic Mr Teachout has give Gordon Edelstein’s production of “The Glass Menagerie” a rave review, calling it “a masterpiece made manifest”.
What’s the problem with iTunes, iPods, and other convenient listening devices, asks The Los Angeles Times’ Steve Almond? Nothing, except for the devaluation of the music experience.
There is no easy answer as to why we keep sales humming for books many would profess are not worth their time. “Betrayal” Lit, as so-called by The Daily Beast‘s […]
Why does the Web version of a newspaper look so different from the print version? It may sound like a simple-minded question, but the answer cuts to the heart of […]
The Washington Post’s Bonnie S. Benwick explores the art and architecture of matzoh balls and describes the celebrations at a traditional Passover dinner table.
Scientists have been stunned by DNA analysis of a bone fragment discovered in a Russian cave which appears to reveal the existence of a hitherto unknown ancestor: Woman X.
Why do we act irrationally? Does free will exist? These are the questions that philosopher Alfred Mele sought to answer when he sat down with Big Think.The Florida State University […]
Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, came by Big Think today to share his unconventional wisdom about highly intelligent people and their preferences. Liberals, he […]