Culture & Religion

State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our “selves” through narrative. In other words, we are our narratives.

Today’s top chefs are dedicating their culinary brain power to cashing in on the burger craze. The secret to good taste is high fat content, says The Wall Street Journal.

In his memoirs, Mark Twain criticized counterinsurgency tactics used by the U.S. during the Philippine-American war and called the foreign engagement a ‘quagmire’.

Children as young as 3 are less likely to help a person after they have seen them harm someone else. This consciousness of other’s intentions is earlier than previously believed.rn

Here is the dirty secret of anomalous phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance: They’ve been demonstrated dozens of times, often by reputable scientists.

They were fast, loud and furious—and when things got out of hand the police sent in the snipers. The Guardian pays tribute to America’s west coast punks.

Americans use language to cover the sleeper, not to wake him, Baldwin said, which was why the writer as artist is so important. Only the artist could reveal society.

“When someone says ‘It’s not about the money, but…’, it’s almost always about the money.” The Boston Globe looks at the phrases we use which betray our true feelings.

What I do know is that playing football has taught me many things. Perhaps the most important: knowing how to react when chaos is going on around me.

Last week’s visit by the pope was largely ignored by Spaniards. Grassrootsrnreligious groups say the time has come for a full separation of state and Church.

Less obsolete but more annoying than a handwritten letter, the phone call is fading as a mode of communication even if the nostalgic will be singing its praises for a while.

Novelist Margaret Atwood recently shared her vision of the future where more and more people flock to cities despite the substandard quality of life they offer.

It’s that other material — the truly vile and illegal stuff, hidden from public view — that represents the true threat to the fabric of decent society.

“The Abu Dhabi art fair offers a glimpse of the emirate’s impressive cultural ambitions.” The city will soon host branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums.

Big Think interviewed an array of luminaries in a variety of fields this week, including “The Office” star Rainn Wilson, famed novelist Salman Rushdie, and writer Walter Mosley. Rushdie came […]

Humanities professor Stanley Fish reviews a plethora of books recently written about the crisis in liberal arts education and finds hope in one innovative college.

“Why are slurs so offensive? And why are some more offensive than others?” asks Rutgers professor of philosophy and cognitive science Ernie Lepore.

An English professor uses Sherlock Holmes to teach her students not to separate academic knowledge from their own hard-earned experiential lessons.

Familiar idioms like ‘a thorn in your side’ and ‘the writing on the wall’ come from the King James Bible. An English linguist has recorded 257 such idioms from the text.

Shedding tears in public was once a sign of weakness and unreliability in men, but today the art of stoicism has been lost. Should we try to reclaim it?

Following reports that performers in ‘Spider-Man’ had sustained injuries while using the production’s complex flying equipment, the Broadway musical has been postponed.

The city that kept out the Republicans and banned Happy Meals has a long history of doing things its own way. The Independent on the history of San Fran.

Award wining Picasso biographer John Richardson examines the painter’s alleged support of communism. Picasso remained sympathetic to Catholicism, Richardson says.

The world is lousy with aspiring novelists who will probably never be published. Intelligent Life Magazine offers insight into what keeps them writing.

“Suddenly art history (once again) finds itself being turned on its head as another aspect of the past gets unearthed and revised.” This time the subject is the women Pop artists.

There isn’t really such thing as a “masculine” and a “feminine,” says feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Because we’ve been so deeply propagandized with the notions about what it means to […]

“What we divulge might seem contradictory or bizarre because the line we refuse to cross is so deeply personal.” Jessa Crispin says privacy concerns are relative.

After T.S. Eliot carried poetry and criticism to unbelievable popularity, literary culture itself seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down, says Joseph Epstein.

While Oscar Wilde is famous for his wit and literary inventiveness, he was also a serious scholar of the classics. The New York Review of Books on his time at Oxford.

Big Think salutes 10 women who have made inroads in professions that have traditionally been the province of men.