Harvard Professor Lisa New describes how Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables speaks to classic American responses to economic crisis.

Mapping the many paths from fully bearded to clean-shaven

In his Floating University lecture, Dr. Jeffrey Brenzel shows how our intellectual history is the story of rediscovering old ideas, and how these ideas will help you address permanent aspects of the human condition.

In this selection from his Floating University lecture, Dr. Jeffrey Brenzel presents five takeaways from reading the classics.

A couple of years ago Steven Landsburg controversially argued that if we want STI rates to fall then what is needed is more people participating in casual sex.  As counter-intuitive […]

How could science fiction get it all so wrong? Big Think posed this question to Jim Kakalios, Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota in a previous post. In […]

In this amazing video, aerial acrobat and dare devil Yves Rossy jumps from a helicopter and flies over the Swiss Alps using a jet pack. Rossy then joins two jets […]

After decades of dictatorship, the people of Egypt, the Arab world's most populous state, have gone to the polls sharply polarized and confused over the nation’s direction.

Could the European Central Bank help avert a Euro meltdown if it bought up the bonds of ailing euro-zone countries on a bigger scale, thereby easing fears of their default?

Alberta, Canada is widely recognized as having one of the best schooling systems in the world. A recent article in Alberta Views highlighted the differences between its system and America's, […]

Governor Brownback’s communications director, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, has taken a 100% certified molehill—an indecorous tweet from a bored school kid who happened to be in an audience in front of the […]

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."

The NATO air attack that killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers at the weekend will worsen the already deep American-Pakistani rift and could spark more tit-for-tat retaliation.

The latest round of international negotiations about climate change will prompt a lot of press coverage, mostly about the likelihood that, once again, the nations of the world will fail to agree on anything of substance.

I just learned that our neighbors are moving, to another state. My heart broke a little when I heard this. They’re moving so that the mom can take a better […]

One hypothesis for the origin of religion is that it's a kind of "costly signaling" - a way for people to prove their loyalty to the group by participating in […]

There are fears on both sides of the political spectrum in France that if China helps fund a European bailout it will come at the cost of some of their sovereignty.

How did we go from seeing genocide and other large-scale crimes against humanity as a consensus-free zone to today's overwhelming acceptance of the "responsibility to protect"?

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is drawing to a close, and with it the brave and caffeine-addled efforts of over 200,000 writers worldwide. Unabashedly privileging "enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking […]

How does creativity work? One family is pioneering an idea called Kaleidoscope Mind which encourages creative thinking by changing the context around any given concept.