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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
2mins
What burdens does the author of “The Things They Carried” still bear?
3mins
Reflections on the younger generation, and on growing old.
3mins
The author and former veteran sees none of his generation’s “edgy,” questioning attitude in the modern military.
5mins
The rebellious anger of the Vietnam era hasn’t stopped war. In fact, “a slight stink of the hip” now surrounds our cultural memory of the event.
3mins
Writing about dead loved ones can’t bring them back—or even preserve their memories, really. But it’s something.
4mins
For Tim O’Brien, “true war stories” can be lies, or take place years before or after a war. Here he shares one that made him want to cry—and reminds him […]
4mins
Part of a writer’s job is to puncture our clichés about subjects like love and war with irony, edge, and ridicule.
5mins
How to convey the horror of war to someone who’s never witnessed it? It’s language, not the pain of remembering, that makes the task so hard.
5mins
Two decades after his masterpiece, the author reflects on war, fatherhood, and the passage of time that’s made him feel like “a stranger to the person who wrote that book.”
2mins
Writing never gets easier, but there are certain mistakes writers can learn to avoid.
45mins
A conversation with the National Book Award-winning writer.
We should arrest the Pope "only if that is where the operation of due process and the rule of law actually take the investigating and prosecuting authorities," writes Allen Green.
Gordon Chang writes that this will likely not be the "Chinese century." Rather, the country has "just about reached high tide, and will soon begin a long, painful process of falling back."
Using instruments in space and on the ground, Scientists have developed the most complete picture yet of how large solar eruptions affect the Earth.
If Christopher Hitchens were to spend "a long and arduous evening in the alehouses and outer purlieus" of 19th Century London, he'd want to be doing it in the company of Charles Dickens.
Faced with plummeting endowments and overextended commitments, public universities are moving toward privatization, writes Edward J. K. Gitre, who worries about the long-term consequences.
Saffa Khan is on four college wait lists, and writes that these lists "prolong the holding pattern of teenage life." Instead, colleges should simply reject those without a reasonable chance of getting in.
Former CIA director James Woolsey says America can end its oil addiction (and its reliance on OPEC) by using more electricity, natural gas and biofuels for transportation.
Citing numerous clues, experts believe that a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was long attributed to the circle of Francesco Granacci is really by Michelangelo.
John Dickerson writes that Sarah Palin has become more a celebrity than a politician. Like Al Gore, she is "a personality–influential, polarizing, and not likely to be president–who talks about political affairs."