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Taking notes by hand helps students learn more and it’s up to teachers to impose anti-screen policies in the classroom as a pedagogical tool. 

If Flannery O’Connor somehow birthed the love child of Sid Vicious, she might end up sounding like novelist Nell Zink. Equal parts Southern Gothic’s grotesquely twisted charm and punk and alternative music’s insiderish anti-establishmentism, Zink’s second novel Mislaid will disorient you until you let it delight you. Zink’s mix — which I’ll call Southern Gothic Punk — might be an acquired taste, but a taste well worth experiencing if only to break out of the contemporary rut of MFA-programed, sound-alike fiction that’s become the bubblegum pop of today’s literature.

“I like to say, the universe doesn’t care about our common sense.  We have to force our ideas to conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around.  And if reality seems strange, that’s okay.” -Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss, from his Big Think interview  

Ever since he came out to the public in February 2007, former NBA player John Amaechi says he has been “that big gay guy.” But there is much more to the 6’10” former center than that. He is one of the very few NBA players with a Ph.D.—after eight years in the big leagues, he returned to academics to pursue a degree in psychology. In this lesson from Big Think+, he shares with you the plan he created as a child to help him accomplish his dreams. The most important step, he says, is knowing yourself and getting clear about your end goal.

And are there independent ways to check? “Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.” –Stanislaw Jerzy Lec Each week at Starts With A Bang, […]

Ambition, goal-setting, and I are awkwardly dating. 

In 1995, I published They Don’t Get It, Do They? Closing the Communication Gap Between Women and Men after writing “The Memo Every Woman Keeps in Her Desk” — a […]

“Teamwork is the signature adaptation of” humanity, says David Sloan Wilson. And our ancestors evolved ruthlessly cooperative means of ensuring productive social coordination. 

Having a conscientious spouse benefits the professional life of the other partner, according to new research out of Washington University. 

The next wave of retirees will be more tech-savvy than ever.

Knowing how to schedule and run an efficient meeting can mean the difference between your employees feeling positively about their day or believing they are slowing wasting their lives.

If all the random motions of the molecules inside aligned, how far and fast would it go? “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.”-Bernard […]

The power (and peril) of habit.

Avoiding self-reflection can be a helpful strategy for delivering a composed and powerful speech, say researchers who examined how confident people prepare themselves to speak before an audience. 

“When people are less focused on self and the problems of the self, there is a kind of alleviation of stress. There’s nothing like reaching out and contributing to the lives of others to give a person a sense of significance and purpose.” -Professor Stephen Post, from his Big Think interview.

Far from dodging the issue of the environment, the mayor of Beijing, Wang Anshun, recently called his own city “unlivable” due to air pollution caused by industry, driving, and a population boom.

America’s most meritocratic institutions—schools, universities, and the workplace—are becoming places where inheritance thrives rather than individuals with talent.

Evolution can be seen as a process of discovering logic that works well in a particular environment. But evolution can’t see what our foresight can grasp. In some cases the logic inherent in relationships of need (e.g. within groups) can be decisive. 

Peter Thiel, whose funding helped pioneer Paypal and Facebook, is now investing in the budding marijuana industry with his venture capital firm Founders Fund.

A team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania has successfully modeled how group decisions form from seeming chaos.

Resulting from President Barack Obama’s efforts to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba, Netflix has made its monthly video-streaming service available on the island for $7.99 per month.

Nassim Taleb’s theories on unpredictable events can inform the MLB Draft’s selection process.

After previously discussing surveillance and autonomous cars, Singularity University’s Brad Templeton returns to Big Think to examine some lighter fare: quantum mechanics and computing.

When parents speak to their infants in the first year of life, it helps stimulate baby cognition in ways that increase the likelihood of future success.

The chief executive officer and president of NPS Pharmaceuticals walks us through the health innovations we can expect in the coming decades.

Legendary college basketball coach Dean Smith died last week at the age of 83. Former NBA player Shane Battier, who was recruited by Smith, but eventually settled on a rival school, recounts his memories of the man.

Strong psychological reactions — call it the yuck factor — could prevent innovative ideas from maturing and therefore from reaching populations in need.

Marijuana might steal the headlines, but psychedelics are making headway in the American consciousness. DMT: The Spirit Molecule producer/director Mitch Schultz discusses this trend. 

A new study, which followed nearly 1 million people over 10 years, concludes that smoking is even deadlier than we thought, accounting for more than 60,000 additional deaths per year and five additional diseases.

There are three things an idea must do to become a full-fledged scientific theory. How does the Multiverse stack up? “It’s hard to build models of inflation that don’t lead […]