Latest Articles

Latest Articles

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

It’s been a tough week in Georgia, with heavy snowfall last weekend that paralyzed the northern half of the state. Now businesses are playing catch up. The mail is being […]
The shootings in Tucson, Arizona appear to have had a truly cathartic effect in the United States. It is almost as though the random actions of a mad man have […]
Last week, I was sharply critical of the way Sarah Palin handled accusations that she was in some way to blame for the Tucson shooting. It is easy to understand […]
Yes, a rare Sunday post, mostly because I'm not sure I'll have a time tomorrow morning for a post as it will be the first day of the new semester […]
Forget that old tagline about the Internet being an information "superhighway". The online world is an information battlefield with pranksters and pragmatists struggling to be heard.
Mysticism has no past, no genealogy, and yet it walks and knows why. How do we account for the religious imagination in the U.S. while Europe grows more and more skeptical?
Prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs have more than doubled in the U.S. over the past 15 years, often given for conditions for which there is scant evidence they work.
The shortage of web addresses is "not a crisis but getting more urgent", say analysts. The web is running out of addresses and IPv6 is the answer.
When future astronomers look to the sky, they will no longer witness the past. Observations will reveal nothing but an endless stretch of inky black stillness.
Today we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on.
Mobile-phone companies across Africa are drawing battle lines to capture the rising middle-class consumer. But in Kenya, the war already is well under way.
Living at a higher altitude may be a risk factor for suicide, a recent study in the journal High Altitude Medicine & Biology has found. The study may help develop new treatments.
Millenniums of bare subsistence have given way to two centuries of luxury. Crass middle-class values are what made the modern world, and we ignore them at our peril.
Mainstream economists are preaching a decade of pain and historically high joblessness as if no alternative policy existed. Dean Baker thinks pessimism has run rampant.
New York taxis are known for lots of things, most of them bad.  Thanks to a new advertising campaign, 500 Big Apple taxis will be known for something great—great art.  […]
Most of you won't believe this, but I've actually gotten several requests to say more about Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, rightly called the best book ever written on […]
There's no reason why education environments in the developing world shouldn't be as elegant and functional as those in the developed. At least that's the premise at the heart of […]
Former New York commodities trader Vincent McCrudden was charged in federal court this week with threatening to kill 47 current and former federal regulators from the Securities and Exchange Commission […]
Wikipedia turned 10 years old this week, and perhaps no entry better captures its chaotic ascendency than that of Jesus Christ.
In a major environmental decision, the Environmental Protection Agency has vetoed the largest mountaintop removal mining permit in the history of West Virginia.