If we’re going to discuss oceanography and climate change, we should at least identify the currents correctly.
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A mile-high tower would not just be a new structure, but a new technology.
Scalars, vectors, and tensors come up all the time in science. But what are they? One of the major goals of science is to describe our reality as accurately as possible. […]
What subjects and ideas do you discuss with your friends when you see them?
How the half-hour commute and motorised transport changed our cities into huge metropolises.
“At times, it seems as if we are condemned to try to understand our own time with conceptual frameworks more than half a century old.” Historian Niall Ferguson says it’s time for an update.
Apple’s removal of the iPhones 3.4 mm headphone jack is causing an uproar as part of technology’s inexorable march forward.
Among many others, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary has managed to offend the previous, current and future presidents of the U.S.
“Crazy at any price!” read a sign above the modern art masterpieces at the Nazi-sponsored Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art,” in English) exhibition in Munich, Germany, in 1937. The fevered brainchild […]
“Artists don’t have families,” the mysterious Warner Dax tells confused painter Daniel at their first meeting in the new film The Time Being. Dax (played by film and theater legend […]
It was four years ago today that Big Think was launched by co-founders Victoria Montgomery Brown and Peter Hopkins to immediate fanfare. That day The New York Times hailed Big Think as “a Web […]
Continuing a tradition I started last year, here’s a very personal, very subjective, “I can’t read everything, so I probably left out something, so mention it in the comments, OK?” […]
[ARCHIVE: Did you miss the webinar? Watch it here! (65 minutes) Be sure to read the comments too! Want to continue the discussion? Look over the resources on the webinar wiki […]
The Strange Death of Radical Journalism And so to another inconvenient truth that should trouble anyone interested in the clash of ideas, real passion in journalism, polemic and a radicalism […]
Yesterday, Google announced their 2011 class of Science Communication Fellows. This year’s program focuses on climate change and I am excited to say that I was one of the selected […]
And so to another inconvenient truth that should trouble anyone interested in the clash of ideas, real passion in journalism, polemic and a radicalism worthy of its name. Iconic, radical […]
Well, after sorting through all of the Leadership Day 2010 posts, tracking down incorrect URLs, deleting a few nonexistent items, and reviewing some attempts to recycle old posts, I believe […]
When I first met Tony Blair in 1993 at his house in Islington in North London, I was struck by two things. First, the man who had just recently become […]
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer wants you to stop eating meat—not because he cares so much about the fluffy animals, but because it’s killing the environment. In his Big Think interview Foer shared with us just how devastating the factory farm industry is, something he learned while researching his first work of non-fiction, Eating Animals. “Animal agriculture is the number one cause of global warming, and yet very few people, including people who are normally quite political and quite moral and moralizing, talk about it. And even fewer people act on their concerns about where food comes from.”
The reason changing Americans’ eating habits is so difficult is because eating meat is ingrained in our cultural narratives as Americans. “Food is not just fact and it’s not just reason; it’s culture, it’s personal identity,” Foer says. “It’s what our parents and our grandparents fed us, it’s how we think of ourselves, and it’s always attached to some kind of a story. And that confuses things. The Thanksgiving turkey confuses things. The Christmas ham confuses things. Every family has its own version.”
And creating a new narrative that excludes meat will be tough largely because Americans are subsidized to eat this way. American farm subsidies lower the price of meat while encouraging inhumane and environmentally damaging farming practices, so much so that the real cost of a 50-cent hamburger, factoring in environmental costs, is actually $200. Plus, the subsidies hamstring farmers that use traditional, non-industrial methods of farming: “We have now created an economic system which is very advantageous to feed animals unnaturally, house them unnaturally, and raise genetic stocks that are destined for illness,” Foer says. “And the small farmers, who are really the heroes of my book, farmers at places like Niman Ranch, farmers like Frank Reese at Good Shepard, farmers like Paul Willis, are at a severe economic disadvantage for doing things the right way; for being environmentally responsible; for treating their animals like animals rather than like rocks or pieces of wood.”
Foer told us that change is very necessary but possible, debunking the idea that industrialized factory farming is necessary to feed the world. The idea that factory farming is necessary to feed the nearly 7 billion inhabitants of earth is “not only untrue, it’s the opposite of the truth,” he says. “It takes seven calories of food input into an animal to produce one calorie of food output. It’s an extraordinarily inefficient way to produce food.” And if the Chinese and Indians begin to eat like American do, which has been the trend in the developing world, “we’re going to have to farm twice as many animals as we do now.” That would amount to 100 billion animals every year.
Foer also spoke to us about his fiction work, telling us that he values the freedom of fiction but that the same freedom is what makes fiction so difficult. And he gave us his take on the film adaptation of his debut novel “Everything Is Illuminated” as well as his thoughts about the form of the novel in the age of the iPad. Literature has always been “slower than the other art forms to grapple with technological and cultural changes…and I think that’s one of the things that people love so much about it,” he said. Whereas music and the visual arts have changed dramatically in the past 100 years, literature has remained largely the same. “Maybe it’s been the saving grace of literature to be so conservative,” Foer muses. “But maybe it will contribute to its death.”
Summer is over. Now fall begins. When we think back on this season in this year will we remember the books, the songs, the finals of the U.S. Open (or […]
Frank Rich’s piece in the New York Review of Books, “Why Has He Fallen Short?” questions the benefits of raw intelligence as the key skill for political life. Or rather, […]
The McFarthest place is somewhere in South Dakota
Ze Frank’s ability to use technology to bring complete strangers together for a ridiculous project.
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American Today, the weekly newspaper for American University, ran this feature on last week’s AU Forum and public radio broadcast of “The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in […]