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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
10mins
African-Americans are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites. Intentional discrimination is a factor in this—as are poverty, educational attainment, urban density, and white flight from urban centers.
46mins
A conversation with the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire.”
Maybe the Tea Party isn’t the real threat to the Democrats after all. The greatest threat to the Democratic majorities in Congress just may be old people. Margaret Talev points […]
The FBI has opened a criminal probe of Massey Energy in connection with the explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine that killed 29 miners in West Virginia last […]
Gary Becker and Richard Posner of the University of Chicago discuss the merits of a Value Added Tax as a replacement for income tax and a solution to American budget deficits.
The Los Angeles Times argues that video game violence is protected by the 1st Amendment and that parents should act as regulators, not governmet.
When did Foucault and Derrida replace Trilling and Eliot? And why do literature students look to philosophers rather than literary critics in the first place?
Almost everyone cheers for the underdog, but why? Turns out it may be to maximize our pleasure and psychological gain when watching sports events.
Beyond novelty, which is extrinsically valuable, lasting love must find ways to enjoy routine activities, which are intrinsically valuable.
The eternal quest for self knowledge has entered the realm of cold data collection: statistics to make our personal lives more calculable and efficient.
The New Yorker looks at the history of The Boston Tea Party and how the event has been appropriated by people of different political leanings ever since.
Of all old media platforms, TV has been the best at adapting to the Internet and still enjoys popularity while the CD, the newspaper, and possibly the book, are in decline.
In an interview with The Nation, historian Tony Judt says consciously choosing to build a social democratic state is an expression of our freedom, not a limit on it.
Athletics isn't all brawn: the professional athlete's brain has been trained to be more efficient enabling them to make quick decisions in a rapidly changing environment.
“I am an optimist,” Brazilian-born artist Romero Britto writes in the introduction to his new book Happy! “I know that isn’t a common trait to have these days, but I […]
Last night, among the eerie nighttime mummies and cave-drawings, a who’s who environmental panel convened at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss how to “move the conversation […]
The distances separating the stars are so vast that it would take a very advanced civilization—perhaps thousands or even millions of years more advanced than ours—to bridge those distances. In […]
2mins
Both are hard, but for the musician and author, one was “terrifying.”
