Italy, says Italian Historian Joseph Luzzi, is a chiaroscuro nation – a land of sharp contrasts.
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When author Nathan Englander visited Big Think, I had one major question for him, which I asked in about six different ways. How, I wondered, do you dare to embark […]
Phoney-baloney outrage. Black-hat, white-hat exaggeration. Every day, I get emails some activist organization or other, suggesting that the nation hangs by a thread, about to drop into a bottomless pit […]
Editor’s Note: Please welcome Korey Peters, who’s written a guest post about an atheist organization he’s founded that he’s calling the Calgary Secular Church. In this post, he’ll explain what […]
The same cultural zeitgeist that gave us the metrosexual – the urban male obsessive about grooming and personal appearance – is also creating its digital equivalent: the datasexual. The datasexual […]
In my early days of blogging, I would have exhaustive debates, sometimes lasting for weeks, with believers who came across one of my websites and posed a challenge to me. […]
What’s the Big Idea? Sometimes you have to be bad in the service of being good, say coauthors and cofounders Frances Frei (a professor at Harvard Business School) and Anne […]
If President Obama is re-elected in the Fall, he is likely to face a Congress even more polarized than today, with the ideological divide greater than at anytime since before […]
Just when you think you’ve gotten away from the so-called “grandmother cell,” it comes around again. It’s the proverbial Whack-A-Mole in the neuroscience world. No matter how many times the […]
If you took the three-question quiz I posted last week, chances are you answered some items incorrectly. Like some of my smart, accomplished friends and family members who took the […]
Engineers at MIT have discovered a new way of gathering depth information that could be used to create 3D cameras requiring only the modest processing power of a smartphone.
Leaving aside a few notable exceptions, the reactions to the latest UN Conference on Sustainable Development—Rio+20, as it’s widely known—read like a collective obituary for global governance. Mark McDonald catalogued […]
With Stephen Colbert on vacation this week, Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona seems to have jumped into the role of the laughable conservative who makes ridiculous arguments with a straight face — or, in this case, who tries to make worthwhile political science research sound ridiculous.
When it comes to being the world’s most digitally innovative nation, the U.S. now trails Romania, which has become the first nation to accept the “Every European Digital” challenge from […]
In the form of a spray can, a small Utah company may have revolutionized how data is transferred over long distances. Forget ugly antennae towers, that tree over there will do.
What is the Big Idea? Tacked on to the end of the lengthy Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed new government safeguards after the U.S. financial crisis, there is an unusual provision […]
Three things stood out to me yesterday amid all the Trayvon Martin related hoopla surrounding the arrest of George Zimmerman on a charge of murder in the second degree. I […]
The idea that social classes are intentional constructions built and reinforced for strategic purposes is appealing because no other idea of social class makes much sense to me.
The ability to sustain focus is one of the building blocks of organization. It is step two in our process to help you become more organized. The first step is to establish emotional control—to “tame the frenzy.” Now we are ready to take the next step—to sustain attention and to stay focused for greater lengths of time.
This month’s buzz award was won by Google’s secretive Project Glass, a concept in development by Google X Lab that promises to replace our smartphones with augmented reality glasses. It’s […]
Energy efficiency means cheaper energy. Cheaper energy means having more money to spend on energy. See the problem? What we really must accept is slower economic growth.
The still life, or, as the French would say, “nature morte,” died sometime around the middle of the 20th century, despite modern art’s attempts to resuscitate the genre into Cubism […]
Just around the corner from my desk something strange is happening. Miles and miles of hair is being teased into place, bucket loads of make-up are being applied and delicate […]
The past few years have been tough on economics and economists. In a searing indictment written one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Paul Krugman concluded that the central […]
What’s the Big Idea? There’s a revolution going on in neuroscience, says science writer Kayt Sukel, and it’s happening on two fronts. One way the science is changing: researchers are […]
“Plan Now. Relax Soon.” The Concierge of a fancy resort has sent me this “Quick! Relax, Goddamnit!” email. My husband and I are looking forward to attending a wedding […]
My research for Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence, Love, Sex, and Relationships wasn’t all orgasms in brain scanners. As I sifted through the scientific literature on love and sex, what I thought was a discussion about romance kept circling back around to decision-making.
Pay attention, get focused, be vigilant, stay on task, keep your eye on the ball, listen up, get your head in the game: these are just a few of the […]
A lot of ink has been spilled over the inconsistent and illogical ways that human beings make choices. Not as much attention has been paid to the decision to make […]
BY AHMED EL-HADY Have you ever thought what is happening in our brains when we wander in the world around us? How do we perceive “reality”? How can we interact […]