Search Results

About 20% of journal articles published in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities are open-access, meaning that only about 1 out of every 5 articles are immediately or eventually […]

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. […]

n Richard Edes Harrison trained as an architect, but became known as an illustrator for Time (from 1932 onwards) and other national news magazines. His specialty was cartography, applying unusual […]

“Pure energy,” intoned Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in the classic Star Trek episode “Errand of Mercy.” (In 1988, Information Society immortalized the phrase when they sampled it into their […]

What excites the legendary computer scientist about the future? In a word: graphics.

Last week, the NAACP passed a resolution at its annual convention asking Tea Party leaders to condemn the racists in their ranks. The NAACP was right on the money. Regardless […]

Today Big Think is pleased to welcome the very talented Maria Popova, of Brain Pickings fame, to our regular blogging team. Known for “curating eclectic interestingness” from around (and beyond) […]

The defining image of the BP oil spill is a suspiciously low resolution video feed from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The much maligned Huffington Post seems to […]

n n (click on the image for a larger version) n ‘Everybody Is Against Everybody – Somebody Has To Be For Them’: the message behind this Amnesty International poster is […]

Like Jerry Lewis, comic books seem to be an American institution best appreciated and understood by the French. Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic […]

There’s hardly a feat of industrial design more emblematic of consumerism than the vending machine. But while vending machines may perpetuate a number of social ills – from conspiculous consumption […]

“It’s obvious to anybody that the mind does much more than solve problems,” Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says in his Big Think interview. “But in a more fundamental way, […]

Nestle has been forced to change its environmentally-destructive business practices after a social media coup; what can netroots activists learn from the victory? After it was revealed that the Swiss […]

The Braille system is one of design’s most ingenious feats. Today, designers are using it to bring more ease and joy into the lives of blind people in everything from mundanity to playtime.

We love Ian McEwan. We also love when esteemed literary publications surprise us with criticism of a writer so adored. Indeed, whatever one thinks of Solar, the new McEwan novel, […]

WikiLeaks.org has released graphic video of a U.S. military attack in Baghdad on July 12, 2007 in which twelve people were killed, including a Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and driver, […]

Alice Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, and Anne Tamar-Mattis made headlines this week with a post on Bioethics Forum entitled “Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb?” The headline made […]

Alan Boyle, the science editor for MSNBC.com, answers our questions about science, the mainstream media and the fallout of the Chilean earthquake coverage.

New to graphic novels? RAW co-founder Francoise Mouly has some suggestions for you.

Composer Tod Machover reflects upon a childhood filled with piano lessons and computer graphics.

As with anything else, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is that the earth is continuing to heat up—this past decade was in fact the hottest […]

Robert De Niro plans to revisit the iconic role of Travis Bickle from the film Taxi Driver more than 30 years after the seminal film was shot, in a new collaboration with Martin Scorsese.

For artists and illustrators, the cover of The New Yorker is the most treasured piece of real estate in American magazine publishing. New Yorker covers have inspired laughter, sorrow (as […]

Audience members present at its launch have noticed something missing from Steve Jobs’ latest Apple offering – apparently the iPad touch screen notebook won’t play flash video.

When J.D. Salinger passed away recently, many casual fans who only remember him from tattered copies of The Catcher in the Rye lost long ago seemed shocked that he was […]

I am back from an excellent science journalism conference in Denmark and will have more to say on the meeting which highlighted several issues that speak directly to challenges faced […]

Graphic novel “Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth” is surprisingly fun, despite the book’s subject being analytical philosophy’s search for the foundations of mathematics.

“Stitches” is only the second graphic novel ever to be nominated for a National Book Award. The author discusses what the honor meant to him and why his dark memoir […]

David Small doesn’t care if you call his “Stitches” a “comic book,” but his inspiration lies with the likes of Tolstoy and Flaubert.

I can recall my very first reader like it was yesterday — the phrase “See Spot run” and the image of a galloping dog with floppy ears is indelibly engraved […]