Culture & Religion

Editors’ Note: It’s too late to heed Mark Card’s advice (below) for Valentine’s 2012. But you’ve got a whole year to save up for two bottles of Tokaji Eszencia for Valentine’s 2013 […]

By the end of this year, there will be more mobile-connected devices than humans, said Cisco in its Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update. There will be 10 million devices by 2016.

Lucy Prebble, a young but promising English playwright, has drawn on her own youth to say that playing computer games is more social and more thought provoking than reading a book.

Dana Cowin, Editor in Chief of Food and Wine magazine and a passionate, longtime observer of food-related behavior, argues that food preferences are a powerful index to a couple’s compatibility.

Dana Cowin, Editor in Chief of Food and Wine magazine and a passionate, longtime observer of food-related behavior, argues that food preferences are a powerful index to compatibility.

Always mindful of the mind, Jonah Lehrer offers a brief history of creativity. Based on empirical results, brainstorming and teleconferencing are out, accidental interactions and trust are in.

Women’s psychology is better suited to keeping the peace, say some of today’s top minds. Informed by evolution, women have a greater incentive to negotiate with those around them.

Becoming a digital pirate must be the least profitable theft crime ever. Using your technical know-how, not to mention buying and setting up servers to not sell anything. Why do people do it?

A new book dispels some popular myths about the difference between introverts and extroverts. In the modern age, the author explains, our culture has shifted to valuing extroverts.

For Americans especially, “being yourself” is a basic cultural value. For the psychologically vulnerable, the cognitive dissonance between this and the constant external pressure to be something other than ourselves can be toxic. 

The hilarious swami of style and fashion egalitarian Simon Doonan, author of Gay Men Don’t Get Fat, offers some efficient guidelines to personal style for the mad scientist whose mind is on loftier things. 

In the seething cesspool of Caravaggio’s Rome, violence was a form of advertisement; it let people know you were, so to speak, the wrong guy to f#@k with. Internationally renowned art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon revisits Caravaggio’s life as a kind of model for career success in tough times. 

Online social networking has made friendship omnipresent, giving you constant updates about even the most casual of acquaintances. How do you go about setting things in order?

As underdeveloped economies grow, wages and respect are on the rise for Latin America’s working class population. The UN calls the region the world’s most unequal society.

No study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems, the very things we would most want to improve.

‘Sex and the City’ star Cynthia Nixon recently said she chose to be gay, sparking a conversation over whether choosing to be gay entails the opposite ability: choosing not to be gay. 

Co-directors of Stanford University’s school of design discuss practical changes individuals and business can make to transform their physical space into a creative and collaborative workshop.

an Iron Chef style creative contest in which you’ll have 72 hours to write a short piece of science fiction inspired by our surprise “big idea.” The best entries will be published on Big Think’s homepage, visited by 1.5 million viewers a month.  

In this guest post, David Bellos, director of Princeton’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, demolishes the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. New Yorkers have more words for coffee than Eskimos do for snow, he says.

What’s the Big Idea? If seeing is believing, then how do we come to know? One common misperception holds that vision springs directly from the eyes. True, the eyes, ears, and […]

Researchers have found that using automated Twitter accounts, or Twitter bots, can bridge social gaps by creating more connections between users than a human community left alone.

Thanks to 3D printers, digital Internet files will soon take on a new direction. They will include design specifications for 3D objects ranging from a pair of sneakers to a new car.

Despite the fact that people with diverse social networks score higher on creativity metrics, we mostly prefer homogeneity, sticking close to people like us when we attend social events.

Thursday, January 19 is when Apple will announce its development of new educational technology. User-friendly interactive electronic textbooks could seriously disrupt the publishing business.

In the climactic final act of Verdi’s opera La traviata, the heroine Violetta is on her deathbed, stricken with tuberculosis. Suddenly her estranged lover Alfredo returns to her side and […]

Many studies have shown how fallible our memories are, from the errors of eyewitness accounts to the gullibility of childhood memories, but does that mean who we think we are is a lie?

The brain is hardwired for storytelling. What stories give us, in the end, is reassurance. And as childish as it may seem, that sense of security – that coherent sense of self – is essential to our survival. 

What’s the Big Idea? In a 2011 interview, physicist Stephen Hawking declared, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail.” Of course, the […]

The issue of illegal immigration is heating up again as November’s presidential decision looms. A fresh wave of political rhetoric along both sides of the aisle — mostly disingenuous assertions calculated to woo a perceived, as-yet-undedicated pool of potential new voters — is picking up pace, left and right. All that speechifying will further ratchet up racial tensions. Over-the-top cartel bloodletting along both sides of the border is just more fuel sprayed on that crazy fire.  

Men and women exhibit big personality differences after all, says new research from a British University. The results come from an analysis of 10,000 Americans ages 15 to 92.