Guest Thinkers

At the age of 14, amidst poverty and famine, a Malawian boy by the name of William Kamkwamba built a windmill from scrap to power his family’s home. Living on […]

The secularist Center for Inquiry issued a press release on Friday headlined: “The Center for Inquiry Urges That Ground Zero Be Kept Religion-Free.” The press release outraged many CFIsupporters, including […]

Beverly Willett spent five years and thousands of dollars contesting her divorce in court and lost. Now that New York has become the 50th state to adopt no-fault divorce, she’s […]

Greg Miller and Joshua Partlow report in The Washington Post this week that the CIA has a “significant number” of members of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s administration on the agency’s […]

Glenn Beck’s appeal is that he makes it all look so easy. I mean, all you have to do is wave your American flag, pledge allegiance to God (the white […]

“New Orleans has gone through a boom while other cities have suffered during the recent recession.” But don’t be fooled, says Slate. Katrina exiled many of the city’s poor.

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.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Mother Teresa, who would have turned 100 this week, helped spark a new missionary model which increasingly sees ordinary people volunteer while on vacation.

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, writes Timothy Egan, but a culture of misinformation can have very serious consequences.

German city planners are hoping that applying “environmental psychology” will help make Hamburg’s huge new urban development a success.

Author David Rieff laments the rise of “fast thought” in books and decrease of works written in the spirit of scholarly investigation, not just to illustrate a thesis.

Near where I live in Berkeley, the country’s first four-year Muslim college just started its first semester. Zaytuna College, which for the time being is run out of the American […]

I can’t say enough good things about Deborah Blum’s “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.” It’s an fast-paced narrative that mixes […]

Perhaps the most effective frame used by opponents of nuclear energy is that it is simply not “cost effective.”  Not only is it wasteful, argue opponents, but government subsidies are […]

We of course have the two robot landers on the surface of Mars (Spirit and Opportunity). The Spirit Rover recently went into hibernation mode and is no longer communicating with […]

“Vision,” Stanford’s Bill Newsome likes to say, “does not happen in the eye. It happens in the brain.” As I mentioned in my last post, this is a general theme […]

Now that August, Big Think’s month of thinking dangerously, is over, we’d like you to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to 10 of the radical ideas we presented.

From Philip K. Dick to Stephen King, the film and TV industry not only adapt the creative narratives of authors but also lean heavily on their devoted fan base to […]

If you think that a thumbs up in ancient Rome meant that the beaten gladiator would live and that a thumbs down meant death, you can thank Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1872 […]