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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
"Shouldn't we expect a scramble to put forward plans for promoting growth and restoring jobs? Apparently not." Paul Krugman is critical of backward-looking economic theorizing.
"Free exercise of religion? No, thanks. The taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization." Christopher Hitchens on the freedom to practice faith.
"What does it take to trade in a commodity that cannot be seen or touched—and isn't even a commodity in the United States?" Scientific American reports on traders in the global carbon market.
"The magic income: $75,000 a year. As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises. Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness."
"The pastor who plans to burn Korans is despicable. But the rush to condemn this maniac clouds legitimate free-speech debate." Tunku Varadarajan on when rights should be abridged.
"Are leaders born or made? Evolution may be throwing us a curve ball when it comes to picking them in the modern world" The New Scientist says leaders must first convince the rest of us.
How can space impact and improve the happiness of a community?
NASA is in a catch 22 situation. Five years ago, Congress mandated by law that NASA should track 90% of all of the dangerous asteroids and comets that may threaten […]
When you compile a list of artists that other artists love to hate, a few names typically appear: Jeff Koons, Thomas Kinkade, and, perhaps most virulently, Damien Hirst. You can […]
The New Yorker’s “Notes on Mourning,” excerpts of Roland Barthes’s (are they?) journal entries regarding the loss of his mother, are extraordinary. They are worth reading for anyone interested in […]
Will Sarah Palin run for president? Could she win? Garance Franke-Ruta argues that Palin’s best strategy would be to remake herself as a leader within the Republican Party. She notes […]
In the wake of the Aug. 23 court decision that halted Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, Democrats are gearing up to use stem cell research as a wedge […]
What is happening to the neurochemistry of an addict's brain that makes that person so unable to do without cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamines?
Who decides what “insane” means? This was the major question of Ken Kesey’s countercultural classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which illustrated how mental illness could be deployed by […]
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The neurotransmitter dopamine is crucial for learning adaptive behaviors, but addictive drugs exploit this normal mechanism by flooding the brain with dopamine.
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“Your legs couldn’t tell you Newton’s laws, but they still obey them, and of course your brain might not be able to explain the laws of statistics, but it still […]
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Kepecs uses rats to study the neurology of decision-making because their brains are evolutionarily similar to ours but much simpler. Likewise, if you wanted to learn how cars worked, you […]
For those of you who don’t frequent Craigslist Adult Services section, life was perhaps pretty uneventful last weekend. However, if you live in the US and are a patron of […]
Few people have felt the muzzle of an automatic machine gun in their gut, let alone survived a kidnapping on their birthday. In January 1998, then-federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was […]