The difference between nailing a scene and turning in a mediocre performance is all about "being present in the moment" while "really being outside of yourself."

Not getting the roles that she wanted right out of school sparked a personal crisis for Judith Light. It took a job as a soap opera understudy to launch her […]

A conversation with the actor and activist

Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine, came by Big Think's offices yesterday for an interview.  He talked at length about the way that the recession has […]

Distraction is a much better tactic for calming children than conventional reassurance, which often heightens fear, researchers have found.

To be alive spiritually is to feel the ultimate anxiety of existence within the trivial anxieties of everyday life, believes Christian Wiman.

Facing economic woes, the Kremlin has decided that Russia needs the equivalent of a Silicon Valley. Leon Aron doubts it can succeed unaccompanied by a spirit of free inquiry.

Profits have plummeted since tools like Napster appeared, and peer-to-peer file sharing has weakened copyright, but has it also benefited all of us, as two academics argue?

Will readers have to flounder in an ocean of slush before the new gatekeepers appear to rescue them? It's getting harder to be a discerning reader in the digital self-publishing era.

“Why would a top military commander allow a journalist so much unfettered access to his inner circle?” Jeremy W. Peters on why Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal let down his guard.

Why was America so rattled by its disallowed goal in last week's World Cup match against Slovenia? Andrés T. Tapia blames violation of the American sense of "internal control."

Media consultant Frédéric Filloux dissects the dire situation of the French press (generalizable to most western media?) and the likely fate of the flagship daily, Le Monde.

A U.K. health watchdog's call for “life-saving” food labeling and other dietary changes has met with an unenthusiastic government response.

Peering at the future of liberal education, Eric Jansson predicts that close faculty-student and student-student interaction will remain the core no matter the fancy technology.

Having staggered through one recession—and without emerging the other side of it—Britain now seems destined for another. This time it will really hurt. A Martian arriving in London, or rather […]

This morning on Morning JoeNiall Ferguson compared General McChrystal to Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, a character uniquely immortalized by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s film (inspired […]

Any art lover who has been to Paris knows what it’s like to try to see everything in a finite time frame. Cruel choices must be made, masterpieces must be […]

If women ran the world, different things would be engineered and invented. Unfortunately, many female scientists get sidetracked.

From our leakage radiation, an alien would be able to tell quite a bit about the planet, including the length of our day, the size of the planet, and even […]

The potential detection of signals from outer space raises many questions. What’s the overarching plan? Who would speak on behalf of our planet? What would they say?