Max Miller
Contributing Writer, Big Think
Max Miller is Big Think's Assistant Managing Editor, in charge of setting daily content of the website and interviewing the illustrious experts that come through Big Think's studio. During his time at Big Think, he has had the pleasure to interview many of the world's thought leaders, including Malcolm Gladwell, Edward Norton, Garry Kasparov, Salman Rushdie, and Julian Schnabel.
Before becoming a Big Thinker, Max lived in Hanoi for a year, where stuffed himself on bun cha and served as the Associate Executive Editor of Vietnam Financial Review, the only independent English-language financial magazine in Vietnam.
Max graduated from Princeton University, where he received an A.B. in English.
From fully-functioning rabbit penises and spray-on skin to ribeye steaks grown in laboratories, here are the most exciting—and bizarre—advances in the new field of tissue engineering.
Entrepreneurship, like theater, requires you to imagine something that doesn’t exist. Hollywood star Jeffrey Wright explains how his training on the stage prepared him to found a mineral company and non-profit in Sierra Leone.
Solar power, driven by exponentially-increasing nanotechnology, will satisfy the entire world’s energy needs in 16 years.
“China does not have to impose this model on anyone,” says Cambridge research fellow Stefan Halper. “It is admired and envied by millions of people in the world beyond the West.”
As our lives become ever more virtual, retailers are betting there will be increasing demand for virtual goods as well. In the future, gaming and retail will be a fully integrated experience.
Big Think salutes 10 women who have made inroads in professions that have traditionally been the province of men.
The pioneering feminist acknowledges that people are frustrated with the Democrats, but warns that the “extreme” policies of the Republican party are bad for everyone—especially women.
The online video series, created by sex columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry in response to recent LGBT teen suicides, has reached the White House. Savage talks to Big Think about its success.
The money you donate to feed starving children may actually be prolonging war in places like Darfur and Somalia, says Dutch journalist Linda Polman.
Far from simply being a relaxed state, meditation is a period of heightened mental activity. Long-term practice can increase one’s capacity for attention as well as compassion.
By studying the neural networks in the brain, scientists have constructed computer-based models that mirror the brain’s complex biological networks.
Given that drugs like Ritalin and Adderall raise productivity indiscriminately, shouldn’t everyone be using them? Dr. Harold Koplewicz, one of the nation’s leading child psychiatrists, thinks ADHD—like the drugs that are used to treat it—is “highly misunderstood.”
The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the limbic system, is where the the brain processes and reacts to frightening stimuli. Because of its mechanism, our emotional responses to situations that feel dangerous are often unconscious.
August may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped thinking dangerously here at Big Think. At the end of last month, we asked readers to submit their own dangerous […]
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s research looks at how language exists in our minds, and how it informs the way we create social relationships.
Psychiatrist Norman Doidge, author of “The Brain That Changes Itself,” discusses how neuroplasticity can be hijacked by an addition to pornography.
It is a cliché that the brain is the “largest sex organ,” but the repetition of the phrase doesn’t make it any less true.
Enjoying a piece of music or recognizing the face of a loved one seems like a simple, instantaneous process. But like all things associated with the brain, they aren’t. Both […]
Who decides what “insane” means? This was the major question of Ken Kesey’s countercultural classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which illustrated how mental illness could be deployed by […]
In 1895 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published “Studies on Hysteria,” a series of case studies of female patients with bizarre symptoms that had no obvious biological cause. Some patients […]
To what lengths would you go to survive in the face of death? Could you amputate your own arm to free it from beneath a boulder? Could you survive 10 weeks on frogs and leeches? Over the next four days, Big Think interviews men who survived the harshest conditions.
What makes some brains smarter than others? Are intelligent people better at storing and retrieving memories? Or perhaps their neurons have more connections allowing them to creatively combine dissimilar ideas?
As we discussed in the previous Going Mental posts, some of the most fundamental mechanisms of the human brain remain a mystery to scientists. Consciousness, intelligence, and sleep are so […]
With brain scans, scientists have learned much about what happens in our heads during sleep, but they still can’t answer the simple question: why do we sleep?
We are currently in the midst of earth’s “sixth great extinction.” For the past 10,000 years, existing species have been dying out faster than new species have been evolving, say […]
What do God, Dr. Frankenstein, and Lady Gaga have in common? They are all names that geneticist-cum-media-sensation Craig Venter has been called since announcing in May that he had created […]
Using lasers to manipulate the weather sounds like science fiction, but researchers at the University of Geneva have done just that. In May, Dr. Jerome Kasparian unveiled the results of […]
Polygamy is alive and well in parts of America. According to researchers at Brigham Young University, there are 30,000 to 50,000 people currently living a polygamist lifestyle in the United […]
Yale professor David Gelernter tells Big Think that America should acknowledge its identity as a Judeo-Christian society and mandate teaching of the Bible in our public schools. America is a […]
You may want to think twice before your next visit to the doctor’s office. According to Dr. Barbara Starfield’s now-famous study, iatrogenic deaths (those resulting from treatment by physicians or […]