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Here’s a distinguished political scientist—Jacqueline Stevens—who agrees with me that the NSF ought to cut the funding for political science.  The Republicans in Congress think that these “scientists” are covertly […]

Several years ago, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister conducted a study that measured the productivity of computer programmers. Their data set included more than 600 programmers from 92 companies. According […]

The future is mysterious, but not entirely. It is tangible in the promises that a person makes and in the unspoken responsibility one has to others. However much a person […]

Call it art, experimental philosophy, theater, or what you will – Jonathan Keats plays the fool as a kind of public protest against the ever-present danger of taking ourselves and our understanding of the world too seriously.

Most “honest” people are willing to cheat by “fudging” their results in order to give themselves small gains.

A collection of the world’s top engineers and tech entrepreneurs will be invited to a hush-hush conference somewhere in the Pacific this May. Eccentric venture capitalists are behind the idea.

Richard Marshall of 3:AM interviews the philosopher Eddie Nahmias about his work on free will. Everyone who would prefer not to be trapped in a thicket of confusion about free […]

What’s the Big Idea? “Contemporary research on consciousness in neuroscience rests on unquestioned but highly questionable foundations. Human nature is no less mysterious now than it was a hundred years […]

by Nika Sabasteanski (guest blogger) Immanuel Kant proposes a one-ingredient recipe for enlightenment: freedom. Provide individuals with the freedom to use public rationality, give them the tools to escape their […]

New scientific manuscripts, political thoughts and love letters written by Einstein have been made public by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which the physicist helped to found. 

Would-be philosopher and founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman realized at a young age that other people give meaning to life. He took up studying software and rest, as they say, is history. 

“Too much experience…may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should be done that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.”

The reassuring point of Jonah Lehrer’s new book is that neuroscientific research into the human imagination will enable us to engineer environments that foster the creativity that is every human’s birthright, rather than extinguishing it.

What’s the Big Idea?  Some genius at marketing giant BBH decided to outfit 13 volunteer homeless people in Austin, Texas with 4G Wi-Fi transmitters, turning them into human Wi-Fi hotspots […]

While researching creativity for his book Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer spent some time at 3M, analyzing the company culture that earned it the title of third most innovative company in the world in a recent survey of executives. 

In Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, there’s a chapter titled “Maxwell and the Nerds” about James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist who discovered the four equations that govern electricity and […]

William Shakespeare:  Playwright, language innovator, father of product placement

What separates the greatest achievers from the rest of us? 

It’s easy to see why, for most of human history, a creative insight was thought of as a divine spirit that came from “some distant and unknowable source, for distant […]

Jad Abumrad won a 2011 MacArthur Genius grant for his work as creator/producer of WNYC’s Radiolab. The Macarthur foundation describes his work thus:  As co-host and producer of the nationally […]

This past week, Restaurant Magazine, a British F&B trade publication, unveiled its latest list of the world’s best restaurants. This annual ranking–properly known as the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best […]

Even people hailed as geniuses have plenty of mediocre and outright terrible ideas. What separates them from the rest is their ability to filter the good from the bad. How do they do it?

Following the news stories of Maurizio Seracini’s search for The Battle of Anghiari, a “lost” 1505 fresco by Leonardo da Vinci that Seracini believes is hidden behind Giorgio Vasari’s 1563 […]

Sherry Turkle is at it again in the NYT.  When we expect more from technology, her story goes, we inevitably expect less from ourselves.  In a high-tech world, we flee […]

A Q&A With Christian Wiman, Translator of Stolen Air When Osip Mandelstam died at age 47 in a Siberian work camp under the Stalin regime, he became one of twentieth-century […]

Andrew Graham-Dixon, who has been called “the most gifted art critic of his generation,” revisits the scandalous, sensational life of Italian painter Caravaggio and finds in it a model for […]

In the seething cesspool of Caravaggio’s Rome, violence was a form of advertisement; it let people know you were, so to speak, the wrong guy to f#@k with. Internationally renowned art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon revisits Caravaggio’s life as a kind of model for career success in tough times. 

In a dream-like scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, the titular tyrant [1] gently plucks a large globe from its standalone frame, holds it longingly in his arms and […]

His experiments provoke thought, laughter, debate, bewilderment, even outrage. So we ask you, readers of Big Think: Jonathon Keats – Genius, or Crazy? 

Archimedes in the bathtub, Newton and the apple, Einstein’s theory of special relativity — Eureka! moments are what happens when hours of work come together in a single creative flash. […]