Latest Articles

Latest Articles

The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.

Image shows Saturn with its rings on the left and Jupiter—with the thickest atmospheres in the solar system, colorful bands, and the Great Red Spot—on the right, both against a black background.
Obviously, the gas giants all top this list. But the fall-off is rapid after that, and the final two spots in the top 10 are truly shocking.
Impressionist painting of a young woman in a blue dress sitting on grass and reading a letter, with soft, colorful brushstrokes.
Books to expand your perspective on history, philosophy, space exploration, and more this year.
the night sky with stars and trees in the foreground.
Human beings only see the Universe now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. What would the earliest life, anywhere, have seen instead?
A man sits on a chair in front of a white backdrop in a modern room with brick walls, two windows, and minimal furniture.
1hr 53mins
Members
Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis.
A man in a suit speaks into a microphone in front of a large American flag.
Andrew Yang, the one-time Democratic presidential candidate, thinks America’s political system is broken. Can third parties fix it?
A woman with dark hair looks upward with a neutral expression, soft light illuminating her face, and a blurred background with warm and cool tones.
10mins
How do you unlearn a story about yourself that the whole world seemed to agree on? Margaret Cho has been working on that answer for a long time. This is where she landed.
Unlikely Collaborators
When people choose the greatest scientist of all, Newton and Einstein always come up. Here's why they should pick Johannes Kepler instead.
Glowing green neural or fungal networks with scattered bright spots are visible against a black background.
Machine learning tools are allowing scientists to better understand forms of intelligence that operate on spaces and timescales utterly unlike our own.
Book cover for "The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness" by Cal Flyn, with "an excerpt from the savage landscape" on a split lavender and cream background.
From Viking tales to modern anthropology, the idea of the "savage" has shaped how outsiders viewed Indigenous societies — and justified attempts to dominate them.
Scientists are livid over the OSTP director's official report to the President. Will it lead to a new golden age for US science, or end it?
An athlete in blue sportswear and red shoes performs a high jump against a clear blue sky, framed by a red, scalloped border.
You don't talk yourself out of it. You out-evidence it.
The grid features 15 images of distant galaxies, each labeled with identifiers and redshift values from z=4.75 to z=8.92. Captured by JWST, these celestial wonders include intriguing little red dots scattered across the vast cosmos.
200 years ago, we hardly knew anything about our Universe on cosmic scales. Today, there's so much that we know. Here's how we arrived.
heavy neutral atom
Early on, the entire Universe was ionized. Without the forbidden two-photon transition, it would have remained that way for far too long.
A literary map of the United States showing states, major cities, and regions, each labeled with notable authors and literary references from those areas.
From Stephen King’s Maine to Steinbeck’s California, Big Think's “A Literary Map of the United States” charts the stories that changed how we see a nation.
big crunch
Our Universe has a positive, non-zero value to the energy within empty space. Can we potentially save ourselves by considering vacuum decay?
A man sits on a chair in front of a white backdrop placed in a grassy field with three sheep grazing in the background.
46mins
Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's 3 conditions for stupidity that destroys societies: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity. 
A person with shoulder-length hair sits on a chair in a bright, modern room, gesturing with their hands. A backdrop and lighting equipment are set up behind them.
1hr 7mins
Members
Physician Giulia Enders walks through 5 body parts, explaining what each one reveals about how we work, heal, and recover.
Four people in grayscale are positioned beside a magazine cover titled "Opt-Out Nation" with a rural landscape; text reads "Big Think Live Event" on a red background.
1hr 20mins
Members
Watch our first-ever members-only event — a livestreamed conversation about our summer special issue, The Opt-Out Nation.
Book cover for "Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One" by DJ DiDonna, featuring a sky background, a red border, and bold lettering that highlights the concept of taking big time off.
The goal of a sabbatical shouldn't be to make you a better worker when you return. It's an opportunity to be a more fully realized person.
A middle-aged man with light hair in a dark blazer gestures with his hands and speaks against a plain, light background.
19mins
Psychologist Paul Bloom explains why morality, the thing that makes cooperation and trust possible, is also what drives cruelty, cycles of revenge, and wars where both sides believe they're the moral ones.