Latest Articles

Latest Articles

The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.

heavy neutral atom
Early on, the entire Universe was ionized. Without the forbidden two-photon transition, it would have remained that way for far too long.
A literary map of the United States showing states, major cities, and regions, each labeled with notable authors and literary references from those areas.
From Stephen King’s Maine to Steinbeck’s California, Big Think's “A Literary Map of the United States” charts the stories that changed how we see a nation.
big crunch
Our Universe has a positive, non-zero value to the energy within empty space. Can we potentially save ourselves by considering vacuum decay?
A man sits on a chair in front of a white backdrop placed in a grassy field with three sheep grazing in the background.
46mins
Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's 3 conditions for stupidity that destroys societies: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity. 
Four people in grayscale are positioned beside a magazine cover titled "Opt-Out Nation" with a rural landscape; text reads "Big Think Live Event" on a red background.
1hr 20mins
Members
Watch our first-ever members-only event — a livestreamed conversation about our summer special issue, The Opt-Out Nation.
Book cover for "Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One" by DJ DiDonna, featuring a sky background, a red border, and bold lettering that highlights the concept of taking big time off.
The goal of a sabbatical shouldn't be to make you a better worker when you return. It's an opportunity to be a more fully realized person.
A middle-aged man with light hair in a dark blazer gestures with his hands and speaks against a plain, light background.
19mins
Psychologist Paul Bloom explains why morality, the thing that makes cooperation and trust possible, is also what drives cruelty, cycles of revenge, and wars where both sides believe they're the moral ones.
A man wearing a black cap and sweater sits with hands clasped, looking upward, with a colorful, blurred face projected in the background.
9mins
RapperIce-T on how his career changed, his life expanded, and his perspective shifted over his last six decades of life.
Unlikely Collaborators
pulse polio day india
It’s not a gambit. It’s not fraud. It’s not driven by opinion, prejudice, or bias. It's not unchallengeable. And it's more than facts alone.
A split image: left side shows an empty bench and rocking chair by a lake, evoking a sense of nostalgia; right side shows a person in a white shirt walking outdoors, partially obscured by a torn-paper effect.
The philosopher Svetlana Boym argues that "nostos" encourages people to reject the world as it is and seek to return to a better time — real or imagined.
Book cover for "The Price of Becoming" by Ryan Hawk, featuring bold black and blue text on a bright yellow background that captures the essence of transformation conveyed in The Price of Becoming.
Focusing on the process is essential, but it can also become a subtle way to avoid vulnerability and commitment.
A shot of the Perseid meteor shower
Although the Geminids have rivaled the Perseids recently, in 2026, the Perseids should win at their peak. Here's why, plus how to see them.
Colorful nebula with red and blue gas clouds, two bright stars—once separated stars now reunited after distant supernovae—and a rocky object, set against a star-filled background in space.
We've never witnessed a system of binary stars both go supernova before. A once-hidden source of gamma rays just revealed the first one.
Book cover for "You Can Just Do Things" by Cate Hall with Sasha Chapin, featuring bold text in red, white, yellow, and blue on a red background with a light green border.
We glorify hard work, but cutting out unnecessary effort is often the best path to get what you truly want.
A middle-aged man with a receding hairline, glasses, and a blue button-up shirt looks at the camera against a plain light background.
10mins
Why does life keep getting more complex? Why doesn't evolution get stuck? Physicist Stephen Wolfram has been working on this for decades. Turns out the answer is more simple (and more strange) than we expected.
A person writes equations on a chalkboard. Their face is obscured by a digital overlay of blue 1s and 0s.
If AI can someday make scientific breakthroughs, what would be left for the brightest human minds to discover?
A man in a suit sits at a table, facing another person whose back is visible in the foreground, against a blue background.
When someone asks you a question they genuinely don’t know the answer to, hold on to them for dear life.
A molecular cloud labeled G+0.693-0.027 is shown in space, with an inset displaying a 3D model of the erythulose molecule—a sugar that may provide clues about the origin of life—found within the cloud.
In a gas cloud 26,000 light-years away, a 4-carbon sugar, erythrulose, has just been found. Here's what it means for life in the Milky Way.
Map showing North Korea and South Korea, demilitarized zone, military demarcation line, and territory sizes in square kilometers, with major cities labeled in both countries.
Neither a victory nor a defeat, the Korean War lingers in a stalemate that remains unresolved.