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How can individuals and groups of people adapt to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds? The answer can be found in a number of new histories of the Second World War, which offer invaluable lessons for the 21st century. 

Last month, the TLC television channel premiered All-American Muslim, a reality show which follows several, from what I can see, fairly normal American families who happen to be Muslims. On […]

Here’s why the B.B.C. has switched off its auto-feed tweets during the day—human tweets are more likely to get people interested and engaged, retweeting and clicking through.

You already know where you stand on Holden Caulfield. Either you found him a kindred spirit in your youth and continue to sympathize with him—less blindly, more wistfully—as you age; […]

What’s the Big Idea? A door to solving several public-policy challenges opens if health insurance is separated from employment. It’s an approach with features attractive to both major parties- and […]

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables is invaluable to us today, says Lisa New, because it presents a particularly “clear-eyed and realistic tale of an economy in transition.”

In the annals of human hatred, there’s a special place for those who play the same game we do—the ones who are on to our tricks and whose mirror tactics […]

You may have heard that another atheist billboard campaign has been censored, this time in Ohio. The Mid-Ohio Atheists had spent several weeks coordinating with the billboard company, planning locations […]

Obamacare is going to get its day in the Supreme Court. The court granted certiorari in—literally, informed the lower courts that it would hear—three cases challenging the Affordable Care Act […]

In the near future you will be able to manufacture a wide array of presents right in your own home with a 3D printer. Think of it as a high tech Santa’s workshop, without the elves. 

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. But eating that apple is not enough. Where you eat it matters almost as much.  At least it did in the mid-19th […]

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of research from the social and behavioral sciences offering insight on how individuals, social groups and political systems come to understand […]

Mourn for a day. Think Different for the rest of your life. That’s the only thing I can think of. I’m still speechless at the news that Steve Jobs has passed […]

            To most journalists, a good story is defined in large measure by how much attention it will get. A story that makes page one, or leads the newscast, is […]

I was reading a trade publication about industry forecasts for bathroom fixture trends some time ago (don’t ask). “Large bathrooms are in,” the experts said. It’s true. American bathrooms have […]

Two interesting case studies of videos that went viral: one was followed by 1 million online product sales and the other translated into none. The difference? A call to action and a link.

William Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital, is an expert at making money. In his Floating University Lecture, Ackman says to be a successful investor you have to be able to avoid the natural human tendency to follow the herd.

Has the Internet elevated political conversation by increasing interaction between average citizens? Or is it plunging the country into an abyss of partisanship and ignorance?

Big Think seems to be involved in a lot of meme-creation these days. And two prominent examples, featuring past Big Think experts Neil deGrasse Tyson and Salman Rushdie, happen to involve the word “badass.”

–Guest post by Jan Lauren Boyles, American University doctoral student. With looming austerity measures that would triple the cost of UK tuition hanging in the balance, Jon Offredo joined the throng of […]

Writer Tauriq Moosa argues that our objections to necrophilia come down to primal disgust, and that most ethical arguments against are logically untenable. 

Be careful what you tweet. Just ask Ashton Kutcher, who tweeted that September 11 — the start of the football season — was “the greatest day of the year.” More recently, […]

Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, knows more than most about how people make decisions. And we often make them badly. As a rule, Kahneman would advise people to slow down their decision-making whenever possible. 

Light field technology is the key to a new camera allowing you to be re-focus images minutes, days or even years after the shot, or to view them in 3D.

The ‘generation gap’ of the 1960’s and 1970’s referred to the differences between the then young baby boomers and their parents about what was wrong and whatshould be – today […]

I’m back! As you may know, I’ve spent the last three days in Springfield, Missouri, having a blast at Skepticon IV. The convention was a weekend of great talks that […]

The Floating University’s first course, Great Big Ideas: An Entire Undergraduate Education While Standing On One Foot, is being used to teach courses at Harvard, Yale, and Bard this fall […]

So I promised I would do a post based on what we can learn about courage from the philosopher of manliness Harvey Mansfield. But it turns out that there’s a […]

Most atheist writers in America have encountered the phenomenon of “fatwa envy“, where Christian apologists sneer that we wouldn’t dare criticize Islam in the same way we criticize Christianity. (This […]

The multi-million dollar estates of the stars in Beverly Hills and the “abandominiums” of impoverished neighborhoods in rustbelt cities such as my own of Baltimore have something in common: they’re […]