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The issue of risk is absolutely central to being a creative person. 

Writer Bill McKibben says that it doesn’t make sense to invest in companies “that make sure we won’t have a planet to retire on…Ask your [organizations] which side of this wager they’re taking.”

Some of his biographers have claimed that Michael Faraday died of a broken heart because his idea of an invisible field of influence was rejected as idiocy by his scientific peers. 

By making adult skin cells behave like a specific class of stem cells called pluripotent cells, scientists are looking to establish the field of regenerative medicine and test drugs in new ways. 

The US has been unwise to reject growing political ambitions from states like Brazil, which offered to broker nuclear arms talks between the US and Iran before President Obama declined the invitation. 

OK, so the NSA is spying on you. Is Orwell’s nightmare coming true?

In 2011, as a Google Science Communication fellow, I spent several days with other scientists and academics at the company’s headquarters learning about new tools and strategies for engaging the public […]

Big Think chief Economist Daniel Altman has a suggestion to end this long national nightmare: get rid of the corporate income tax.  

“Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed/ The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,” William Shakespeare writes in his Sonnet 27. “But then begins a journey in […]

Does the rise of the robots doom us all to unemployment? The answer is most certainly no. Provocative claims that the United States has reached “peak jobs” and will soon […]

It’s interesting but apt that the prostitute, the stripper, and the porn actor—the real professionals!—are sometimes embraced and emulated as role models in this sexual rat race of ours. You’d […]

A little bit of game theory suggests how Edward Snowden’s odyssey might end.

Every now and then we hear about people who are doing extraordinary things. It could be a world leader saving millions of lives, a businessperson revolutionizing an industry, or even […]

I’ve come up with many business ideas for my startups by attending conferences that are outside my realm.  

So David Brooks wants to arouse in us some SELECTIVE NOSTALGIA for neoconservatism.  That’s not surprising, because he once was a “neocon”—or a “national greatness” conservative. Now the brand “neocon” […]

When Man of Steel opened in theaters on June 14, 2013, it pulled in $116.6 million USD that opening weekend alone. Superman remains a box office bonanza in his eighth […]

There were three great scientific horse races in the last century. The first two, the race to the moon and the race to split the atom have been widely reported. […]

The legal system is ill equipped to render justice in the tragic death of a young black man.

My work with The Mission Continues is the greatest way that I can take care of the people that I served with.

Solving puzzles can give you a sense of satisfaction that you don’t get in everyday life.

This is not a moral appeal. This is not a political appeal. This is a linguistic appeal.

This past Memorial Day weekend I visited my parents in Virginia. I live in Brooklyn, and their suburb of Washington, DC feels like being out in the country. It’s quiet, […]

I assert that if you are depressed after learning and being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.

It is happening…but as the quote often associated with discussions of innovation suggests, “the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed….” For years, I’ve predicted, promoted and pleaded […]

I just got back from counseling at Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times (CRMFGT) in southern California. For those of you who are not familiar with CRMFGT, it’s a camp […]

Not only are machines rapidly catching up to — and exceeding — humans in terms of raw computing power, they are also starting to do things that we used to […]

Modern technology has done nothing to make humans more humble. Quite the contrary. So secure are we in our confidence of our superiority to ancient cultures that discoveries like the […]

At the time of his arrest in 1995, Kevin Mitnick was the most wanted cyber criminal in the United States. The arrest marked the end of an intense two and a half year electronic manhunt, a game of cat and mouse that Mitnick likens to a video game. 

Going to college in the mid 70s I started to smoke marijuana occasionally and wondered why people were getting arrested.  Why did I have to worry about getting arrested for this sort of thing?

“Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It’s knowing you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. […]