Jason Gots
Editor/Creative Producer, Big Think
Jason Gots is a New York-based writer, editor, and podcast producer. For Big Think, he writes (and sometimes illustrates) the blog "Overthinking Everything with Jason Gots" and is the creator and host of the "Think Again" podcast. In previous lives, Jason worked at Random House Children's Books, taught reading and writing to middle schoolers and community college students, co-founded a theatre company (Rorschach, in Washington, D.C.), and wrote roughly two dozen picture books for kids learning English in Seoul, South Korea. He is also the proud father of an incredibly talkative and crafty little kid.
If you are in the throes of a metaphysical hangover, we offer you the cure: a whimper over the Mayan prophecy of apocalypse in the year 2012, followed by a shattering meditation upon the various ways the world might end.
A forum where top mixologists explore the party drinks defining the 21st Century.
So you want to live forever? Double-check your motives, says ethicist Paul Root Wolpe.
Amid widely-publicized corporate scandals, global environmental threats, and powerful advances in biotechnology, says ethicist Paul Root Wolpe, big companies find themselves tromping through an ethical minefield, and desperately in need of guidance.
"Retention, even in difficult times," says Rich Lesser of Boston Consulting Group, "becomes a bellwether for employees about whether they should invest back in you, and so your priority is . . . to know the things that are most important to your future success, and invest starting with the people.'"
If managed intelligently, efforts like Mark Tercek’s with the Nature Conservancy may succeed in funding ambitious environmental projects that would otherwise remain on the drafting table, and transforming the way industry understands its relationship with the Earth.
Historian Niall Ferguson responds to a recent study suggesting that the US is on the verge of a manufacturing renaissance. He believes that major legal and economic reforms would have to take place first.
Big Think seems to be involved in a lot of meme-creation these days. And two prominent examples, featuring past Big Think experts Neil deGrasse Tyson and Salman Rushdie, happen to involve the word “badass.”
Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, knows more than most about how people make decisions. And we often make them badly. As a rule, Kahneman would advise people to slow down their decision-making whenever possible.
Oh how I wish David Foster Wallace had been my English professor. The University of Texas has recently posted the syllabus from the English 102 class he taught at Pomona […]
In many areas of the increasingly networked global economy the middleman is more in demand than ever.
Our power to manipulate our brains and genes is increasing dramatically – and it raises serious ethical questions.
Among the counterintuitive facts that leadership expert Jim Collins has uncovered is that personal charisma is largely irrelevant in successful leadership. In fact, it can be dangerous.
Yesterday, Big Think Expert and renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt won the National Book Award for nonfiction for bringing to life a 15th century book-hunting expedition that changed the world. A true […]
It’s dangerous business calling any tech innovation idiotic these days. The next thing you know, the company’s worth $50 billion. But it is hard to imagine many (hearing) people beyond […]
Let's inject a little lifeblood into the 2012 presidential race.
For Bruce Finley, the benefits discussion is a major (and often lost) opportunity for companies to reach young workers in a meaningful way, getting them more deeply invested in their careers and their futures.
Big Think's Chief Economist Daniel Altman examines the origins of the Euro Zone and some of the inherent challenges it faces.
Over-reliance on foreign aid as opposed to tax revenue, says Sophal Ear, a leading expert on post-crisis economies, leads to corruption.
Coming from an upper middle class family, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says, he could have afforded to pay some college tuition. Instead, he was the beneficiary of the tax dollars of less well-off New Yorkers. He argues that "tuition discrimination" makes private universities a fairer option.
Particle physics. Human self-determination. Evolution. According to Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt, we owe these modern ideas to an ancient Roman poem, rediscovered in 1417.
In addition to demotivating talented workers, an opaque and dictatorial leadership style can silence innovation from below, leaving the leader in charge of coming up with all the great ideas.
The Family Meal, Ferran Adrià's new cookbook, gathers thirty-one three-course meals that the chef created for nightly staff dinners at El Bulli.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita sees key messages of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement – as two misguided responses to the powerlessness many Americans feel.
Photo Credit: Jennifer Dessinger Adam Gopnik calls Jonathon Keats “a poet of ideas, whose work always rests on a solid basis of scientific research and resolves in a startling, semi-serious […]
According to Princeton Neuroscientist Sam Wang, co-author with Sandra Aamodt of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain, the benefits of bilingualism go far beyond the ability to order convincingly at Maxim’s in Paris, or to read Dostoevsky in the original.
What’s the Big Idea? For some of us, it was Spock. For others, a humiliating performance as a pilgrim in the kindergarten musical. For me, it was William Blake’s relentless […]
Psychologist Dan Ariely says Zappos' policy of offering potential customer service employees $3000 not to take the job is money well spent.
For almost 2000 years, Western Art has groped about in the darkness, laboring under the Ptolemaic misconception that Earth (and humankind) is at the center of all things. Until now.
Making art, says Singer-Songwriter Josh Ritter, is half of the artist’s job. The rest is hustling on its behalf – making sure the world hears it. (Exclusive, in-studio performance at the end of the article)