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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
"Virginia Lamp Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is fighting for what she believes in, and for that she should get enormous credit."
"As Wikileaks prepares to release more documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, will greater accountability follow?" Al Jazeera on the controversial startup.
"Faced with electoral repudiation, Democrats are unleashing government power to silence their political opponents. The press corps ought to blow the whistle."
"When you lose your job, social stability is likely to be worse—which threatens democracy and even peace." The I.M.F. sees no immediate end to the economic crisis.
In his new book, bestselling author Steven Johnson discusses the history and sources of innovation. Johnson asks: Where do good ideas come from?
"Poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no reason to think that they could be suitable objects of 'research.'"
"The natural human optimism that allows people, election after election, to believe campaign promises also consigns them to repeated bouts of disappointment."
"Whether on average democracies are more conducive than autocracies to economic growth is far from well established." Nobel laureate Gary Becker on governments and growth.
"When thinking about the Columbus Day holiday it helps to remember the good intentions of the people who put together the first parade in New York."
Humans have typically been passive listeners for alien radio frequencies. Should we actively seek out foreign life by sending pre-emptive signals into space?
The 18th century French Neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres played the violin well enough to hold his own with “Sold His Soul to the Devil” good musicians such as […]
Hours wasted behind the wheel commuting to work, taking kids to school, hurrying for soccer practice and bar mitzvahs, and the frustration caused by traffic jams and road rage – […]
"Eliminate the costs, fiscal and otherwise, of the drug war." The Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman says the war on drugs is a sinkhole; the government should change policy.
"How worried should one be about [full body scans in airports]? Are they truly a grave threat to individual privacy, as civil libertarians contend?"
"Can—and should—science and religion avoid each other's turf?" Susan Jacoby insists we mustn't shirk from moments when science and religion offer opposing viewpoints.
"High tariffs and currency wars cost us big in the 1930s. We can avoid making the same mistakes again." The Wall Street Journal on the history of the tariff.
"Two planets similar to Earth have been discovered circling the dwarf star Gliese 581. Using new, super telescopes, astronomers are now searching for signs of life."
"Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has."
"For all the money sloshing around in American politics, you still cannot buy the results of elections." The Economist says the law of diminishing returns applies to campaign money.
"Saul Bellow's letters are to be published later this month, five years after his death. Letters to Philip Roth and Martin Amis provide a taster of the much-anticipated collection."