To fight child obesity, the federal government wants to limit the kinds of foods available to children. The food industry has already proposed its own set of weaker standards.

There are pluses and minuses to living with pets, not only with respect to your happiness and housekeeping, but also with respect to your physiological and psychological well-being. 

Do you have the ethical obligation to inform a friend if their spouse is cheating? Is love even ethical at all? The Ethicist Randy Cohen weighs in.

Former New York Times columnist Randy Cohen tackles the ethics of love in the latest in this Big Think series.

From stock trading to lawmaking to data-driven school reform, we are becoming increasingly dependent on mathematical models to explain the slippery complexity of human nature. 

What it means to go beyond seeing and to actually observe.

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Big Think is searching for a tagline and we want your help! Below you'll find a long list of taglines suggested by Big Think's staff and friends. You will find […]

The Dutch-born biologist Frans de Waal has chosen to study not what makes humankind vile and mean but rather what causes us to rise up in support of others, i.e. our moral potential. 

Composer, singer, mother, AIDS activist; Alicia Keys wears many different hats, but they all seem to match her spirit of self-respect, humility, and desire to be a role model for her son. 

     The bulb wars burn brightly on. The members of the U.S. House who represent people for whom anti-government ideology burns more brightly than common sense have come back from […]

Now that the EMMY NOMINATIONS are out, I can give my awards for the best CONVERSATIONAL TV shows.  My standard, of course, finds its peaks of excellence in conversational films […]

Passed over for the Secretary of State position, John Kerry has fashioned an active role for himself as a diplomat and foreign policy adviser to Obama. Will he get the job in 2012?

After Tatiana de Rosnay's novel about the French Holocaust was rejected by some 20 publishers for its dark context, it was finally picked up and promptly sold 5 million copies. 

Chairman of the media empire News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch insists his company has made only minor mistakes in the phone hacking scandal now being investigated by the F.B.I.

The release of the eighth film in a series of books and movies marks the end of the epic Harry Potter story. The series has received deserved accolades and is […]

Jim Zarroli and John Ydstie filed stories for NPR this week on the "new normal" for the American economy, with experts anticipating that 2% annual economic growth will be a […]

When you hear the name Samuel F. B. Morse you most likely think about Morse code or the telegraph. In reality, Morse only co-invented the code that bears his name […]

Through a literal deconstruction of the army uniforms of the veterans in the project, the “Combat Paper Project” hopes to provide cathartic healing and deconstruct the pain and trauma that their military service has left them with.

As print sales decline and new e-platforms pop up everywhere, the future of the book has become a source of widespread speculation. In my previous post I asked: what’s the […]