Search
Latest Articles
The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
"America’s biggest—and only major—jobs program is the U.S. military." Robert Reich says we need a jobs program for public goods like light-rail and renewable energy, not outmoded weapons.
"The search for artificial intelligence modelled on human brains has been a dismal failure. AI based on ant behaviour, though, is having some success." Now engineers study ant collectives.
"The Democratic Party has moved to the left even as its take from financiers has soared," says a new book on politics. Slate replies that a Democratic move to the right better explains the donations.
"So far, so Minority Report." The New Scientist heads to Los Angeles to investigate the development of gesture-based computing, a fun exercise intended for serious number crunchers.
Just as better off New Yorkers head for the Hamptons in August and the French head en masse on holiday, clogging up roads, the British see August as the month […]
The Ice Storm, Rick Moody’s novel, was published in 1994, set in 1973. One of the things readers who loved the book but were not yet born (or were barely […]
4mins
New models for media and better media literacy are important but not enough; we need to reexamine our public institutions, from local to federal levels.
5mins
Atheists honed their online chops earlier than most religious bloggers, but church-goers have the advantage of large non-virtual communities that can be leveraged on the Internet.
2mins
Before the oil spill, the public favored energy exploration and economic development over environmental protection. Six weeks later, that public preference had flipped.
3mins
People tend to self-select themselves into ideological echo chambers, says Nisbet.
4mins
One survey found that 90% of all the information on blogs and independent media sites was repackaged from traditional news sources.
4mins
The answer lies somewhere in between, says Nisbet.
3mins
Nisbet talks about his new blog, which will discuss the intersections of communication, culture, and public affairs.
27mins
A conversation with the professor and blogger.
There are few things we take more for granted than the concept of gravity. Through history, physicists like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein have developed theories about the Universe that […]
It’s been a good year for Emily Pilloton, founder of social-good nonprofit Project H Design and author of the excellent Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People. A PopTech fellow […]
In the study of uniquely human traits—language, mathematics, moral behavior—there are few academic stars as bright as Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard. His collaborators in academia are top-shelf (they […]
David Adamovich throws knives for a living. Really big knives. With 25 world records under his belt, Adamovich is the world’s fastest and most accurate knife thrower. He also holds […]
This has been the “Summer of the Spill.” Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on April 20, 2010, the epic BP oil spill has oozed into imaginations trying to […]
Why are we using 1970’s style distribution techniques for anything in 2010? I was tooling through the black conservative website Booker Rising when I came across a comment by one […]