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Develop leaders in your organization with Big Think+ classes
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Create premium thought leadership and storytelling with Big Think Creative
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Bring your people and ideas to life with Big Think Events
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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
44mins
Author Malcolm Gladwell explores the fallacies behind the Second Amendment in conversation with Jonny Thomson.
Everyone matters. If you believe that, it's a good sign.
After a plague-ridden crusade left Venice drowning in debt, the republic created the world's first bond market, changing the relationship between the government and its citizens.
The world webcam map, a defunct format from Web 1.0, is a foil to today’s algorithmic internet.
Classics editor Henry Eliot shares his strategies for getting started, staying motivated, and finding joy in literature’s great books.
A map is a text in its own right, and like a Pynchon novel, this one can be read in a multitude of ways.
The matter that creates black holes won't be what comes out when they evaporate. Will the black hole information paradox ever be solved?
In 1982, an experiment showed unprecedented evidence for exotic matter: magnetic monopoles. But without reproducibility, it didn't hold up.
As the Earth spins and wobbles on its axis and revolves elliptically around the Sun, each day differs from the last. "24 hours" isn't right.
Classicist Natalie Haynes joins us to discuss the trials and joys of learning about ancient Greece and its myths.
The Great Epizootic of 1872 gave James Law the evidence he needed to challenge centuries of thinking surrounding the origins of disease.
In technology, we make cumulative advances that withstand time. Not so in politics and ethics, argues philosopher John Gray.
The evidence that the Universe is expanding is overwhelming. But how? By stretching the existing space, or by creating new space itself?
The Earth is neither flat nor round. Actually, it's somewhere between a potato and a billiard ball.
Our collective knowledge has made us better off, but only when communities and social institutions adapt it for the common good.
We live in a four-dimensional Universe, where matter and energy curve the fabric of spacetime. But time sure is different from space!
Big Think’s latest poster is a detailed look at humanity’s loftiest enterprise so far: making it off-planet.
Most of us have heard that the Sun is an ordinary, typical, unremarkable star. But science shows we're actually anything but average.
"Publish or perish" has become an academic cliché. But the biggest casualty isn't researchers — it's scientific discovery itself.
John Templeton Foundation
The double-slit experiment, hundreds of years after it was first performed, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics.