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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Last week, Praxis guest blogger Zane Friedkin drew on principles of Kantian ethics to build a case against the Obama administration’s drone campaign in the Middle East and North Africa. I agree that Kant can help guide the debate, and I too have serious misgivings about the recent escalation of ...
What is the Big Idea? Step into a classroom in North Korea and you will find very little that differs from a classroom in New York City - chalkboard, rows of desks, chairs, desktop computers and bulletin boards full of text and pictures. But stay a little longer and you might notice something ...
What is the Big Idea? If rocket launches are a symbol of a country's ambitions, then what the world witnessed on Friday was North Korea's failed attempt at a Sputnik moment. The rocket, which broke into pieces harmlessly over the Yellow Sea, suggests that the country has yet to acquire the ...
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, the 20 year old Iraqi founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement – a forum for the discussion of rational humanism with 42K fans on Facebook. It started when I was a child and has never stopped since then: the desire to ...
What is the Big Idea? Earlier this month, 20-year-old student Tsering Kyi emerged from a public restroom at a produce market in Tibet, soaked in gasoline and with a defiant fist in the air, lit herself on fire. She was protesting a policy change at Maqu County Tibetan Middle School, in Gansu ...
What is the Big Idea? A new ad released by Rick Santorum’s campaign team inserted President Obama’s face for a split-second into a montage about Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The controversial ad, Obamaville, imagines a future in which Obama is reelected, with a narrator describing a ...
What is the Big Idea? While Israel and Iran teeter on the brink of war, two Israeli graphic designers decided to reach out to Iranian citizens by creating a slogan that Internet users can impose over any photo of their choice. The text reads "Iranians, We Love You." Iran's netizens responded ...
The United States is entering uncharted waters as a superpower, as it slowly climbs out of a crippling recession and faces an electoral showdown this fall between cautious globalism and a desire to retrench its economy against external competition from emerging third-world dynamos. President ...
Welcome to an ongoing feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community. This week we're featuring a discussion prompt from Saul Levmore, William B. Graham Distinguished Professor of Law, University of ...
Attention, extraterrestrials studying political economy and writing about humans on Earth for your doctoral dissertations: you could do a lot worse than starting your research by reading Alan Beattie's new book, "Who's in Charge Here?" If you thought that the North-South politics of the United ...
Jonathan Fleece is a leading health care attorney in the U.S. and the co-author of The New Health Age: The Future of Healthcare in America. Depending on which economist has the stage, America's economy is either experiencing slow growth, remains dismally flat, or stands ready to fall off a cliff ...
President Obama has unveiled his proposed 10-year budget today, and while there’s nothing particularly shocking included for those who have been following the ongoing debate between the White House and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the new economic plan for the United States ...
Severe income disparity and fiscal imbalances are the biggest threats to globalization, according to the 2012 Global Risks report released last week. The content of the report will be on the agenda for the annual World Economic Forum taking place in Davos on January 25-29. The findings ...
China and Russia made the news recently for their relentless cyberattacks on US cyber systems. Earlier this month, viruses originating from these countries are blamed for the theft of personal banking information belonging to students and faculty members at the City College of San Francisco ...
Occupy Wall Street is a giant human hashtag -- a conversation, a thread, a way of organizing ideas. I resist calling it a “movement” because that may imply that people who do not yet consider themselves participants are excluded from the conversation. What Occupy Wall Street allows people to do ...
