Daniel Honan
Former Managing Editor, Big Think
From 2011-2014, Daniel Honan was the Managing Editor at Big Think. Prior to Big Think, Daniel was Vice President of Production for Plum TV, a niche cable network he helped launch in 2002. The production team he oversaw won over two dozen Emmy awards. Daniel has created numerous shows and documentaries for television, and his film credits include Stealing the Fire, a documentary on the black market for nuclear weapons technology.
Follow Daniel on Twitter @DanielHonan
Paul Ekman studies "the lies that society cares about catching and generally disapproves of." After all, we lie most often to avoid punishment for breaking a rule.
Selling a story is no different than selling any business idea. Hollywood writers just happen to have a unique gift for pitching their stories. Storytelling, after all, is their business. So what are the elements of a successful Hollywood pitch that anyone can learn from?
How do we understand the rate of technological change and how can we develop the tools to best adapt to this change?
Small and nimble research labs are proving that they have a method for speeding the pace and reducing the cost of discovery.
PSY's viral hit Gangnam Style is testing two longstanding trends: mainstream American culture as a monolingual culture and the global dominance of the English language.
"We see on the basis of what we believe, not the other way around," Errol Morris told Big Think in a recent interview. In other words, our relationship to the truth is never neutral nor "value-free."
"Americans censure nepotism on the one hand and practice it as much as they can on the other." --Adam Bellow (the son of Saul Bellow)
Is Salman Rushdie a blasphemer or a humanizer?
Ever since antiquity we have been searching for perfect mathematical equations to explain a perfect Universe. Now a Japanese mathematician may have cracked an unsolved problem "at the center of everything."
DARPA's 100-Year Starship Initiative aims to make human space travel beyond our solar system possible within 100 years.
What if advertising could be used for things that we really do need? Alain de Botton imagines what a world would look like if the tools of advertising could be used to nudge us to be the best of ourselves.
Was Shakespeare gay? Stephen Greenblatt says that Shakespeare inhabited a world in which "it is much more possible to express homosexual passion and enact that passion without triggering a social crisis."
What if you could bottle President Obama's famous cool, Lady Gaga's style and Michael Phelps's athleticism? An experimental philosopher is attempting to do just that. Sort of.
Today's rising generation, or Internet Pioneers, are a complex bunch. They are "impatient, empowered, multi-tasking, curious, confident, confused, sexually liberated, sometimes binge-drinking, and often fragile kids.”
Rapid cost reduction, or demonitization, has led to breathtaking innovation in the field of unmanned air vehicles (or UAVs), and UAV advocates see the FAA issuing personal and commercial licenses by 2015.
If you haven’t yet seen Bill Nye’s video on evolution versus creationism, watch the video here: This video has made national headlines, received nearly 3 million views on Youtube, and […]
According to Jeff DeGraff, half of the challenge for innovators "is having the courage, the temerity, the will to actually stop doing something, which is infinitely harder than starting something new."
How do you turn a liability into an asset? Ed Conard, a former colleague of Mitt Romney's at Bain Capital, says Romney's history with the company should be an asset because Romney is an "outstanding business executive" who always took the longview.
The theme of this year’s Nantucket Project is Collective Intelligence, or how we can leverage technology and other advances to aggregate and amplify human intelligence. We plan to utilize the […]
Big Think has reached into our archive and also sourced expert opinions from around the Web to showcase the big ideas from each political party. Call it a virtual convention of ideas.
Charles Darwin's correspondence reveals how he struggled with the work-life balance and how that influenced his decision on whether or not to get married.
The point of marriage is to grow old with someone and develop a sense of trust. Therefore, Christopher Ryan argues we need to take a "harm reduction approach" over an "absolutist approach."
“You don’t arrest Voltaire.” That was French President Charles de Gaulle’s explanation for his pardon of Jean Paul Sartre, who was arrested for civil disobedience during the events of May, 1968 […]
Julian Assange, who has been granted asylum by Ecuador but remains in limbo in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, has been on trial for some time in the court of public […]
According to Henry Rollins, education is the great leveler of the playing field, which is why the punk rocker says that elites are fearful of it. What would happen if […]
The "fiscal cliff" is so named because the change it describes will not be gradual, but steep and dramatic. Howard Dean argues that pain is necessary in order to restore fiscal sanity.
What is the strongest motivation for space exploration today? According to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, it's the promise of economic return.
NASA engineer Adam Steltzner is driving his team to attempt the seemingly impossible.
In some ways, it's quite practical.