We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
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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It’s unclear exactly what he said, but on Monday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke during an oral argument for the first time in nearly seven years. What prompted the sabbatical from his studied silence? It appears he took the opportunity to make a sarcastic comment about the quality ...
Editors' Note: On New Year's Day, 2013, protests erupted in China's Guangdong province over government censorship of a newspaper, Southern Weekly. In highly unusual show of resistance, the paper's reporters demonstrated in the streets, protesting the rewriting of a New Year's editorial by the ...
According to a national poll conducted last week by Public Policy Polling, Congress is more noxious and scurrilous than a cockroach infestation. In a series of head-to-head comparisons, Congress also proved more unpopular than traffic jams, root canals, the despised band Nickelback and even ...
The debate over Chuck Hagel's nomination for Secretary of Defense has centered around a number of his past positions that seem to have very little to do with the principal role he has been appointed to serve -- overseeing the downsizing of the military industrial complex. The position of ...
At the beginning of December, I naively predicted that legislators would put an end to the fiscal game of chicken they were playing with the American economy. As the month and the year expire with no sign of compromise on the horizon, a dive off the fiscal cliff looks increasingly likely. It’s ...
It’s hard to know what leads lemmings to race willfully to their own demise. But I’ve come to believe that the suicidal tendencies embedded in American tax and fiscal policy arise directly from the teachings of modern economic theorists. One of the first lessons of introductory economics is a ...
What's the Big Idea? If you're stuck in the middle of an economic downturn, Big Think's chief economist Daniel Altman says in his latest video lesson, "it's not a good time to put on the brakes with fiscal austerity, raising taxes to raise more money, and cutting spending to tighten the ...
As our leaders in Washington, D.C., hurtle closer and closer to the fiscal precipice, it’s worth reminding ourselves of how a friendly game of “chicken” can end. This is what happened to a British schoolgirl last week: A 13-year-old girl died after being hit by a tram while allegedly playing ...
Dear Representative Boehner, Earlier this month, after President Obama was re-elected, you assured America in an interview that you are the "most reasonable, responsible person here in Washington.” No one wants to hurtle over the “fiscal cliff” in January, even if it is just a “fiscal slope,” and ...
"Millions of words have been written about organizational leadership – especially in an anxious economy." So writes John Boyle in his introduction to Leadership in Uncertain Times , a series of interviews with some of the best and brightest business leaders in the country. Boyle says his goal is ...
What's the Big Idea? Here's a radical idea from Henry Rollins: let’s make college tuition "either free or really low." What would be the result? You would have a country "full of whip-crack smart people" that the rest of the world will fear. Our enemies "will not invade a country of educated ...
Just before leaving office in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a farewell message in which he warned of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Ron Paul, who is retiring from Congress, today delivered what might ...
It's been a week since the presidential election and all the focus has shifted to whether there will be some sort of "grand bargain" between the White House and congressional Republicans on the so-called "fiscal cliff." And yet, to answer this question, argues New York University professor of ...
"All men will become brothers under thy gentle wing." Thus sings the chorus in the final movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which serves as the anthem of the European Union. That phrase rings rather hollow these days as Spaniards suffering through 25 percent unemployment burn effigies of ...
What's the Big Idea? Here's the $720 billion question: who will blink first -- President Obama or Congressional Republicans -- when it comes to negotiating a plan to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff," the series of tax hikes and spending cuts that are set to go into effect at the end of the ...
