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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
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A conversation with the attorney and founder of the Innocence Project.
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Appel thinks it's most important that children be born into families that want them. "My concern is for the potential gay child born into the bigoted family who mistreats that […]
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Appel thinks the most pressing ethical issue of our time is "the arbitrary distinction that people have more or fewer rights because they were born on one side of the […]
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Forcing people to make a doctor’s appointment in order to get medicine keeps some people from getting the care they need.
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In objecting to all of these phenomena, people say they're concerned about the welfare of the individuals. But they're really just interested in imposing their own social or religious values […]
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A person should have the right to end their own life, so long as they can prove that they are thinking rationally over a prolonged period of several days.
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The bioethicist believes that life should be divined by cognizance, by sentience, and by the ability to interact with the world. Infants who can’t do that should have their lives […]
As we discussed in the previous Going Mental posts, some of the most fundamental mechanisms of the human brain remain a mystery to scientists. Consciousness, intelligence, and sleep are so […]
In a now famous skit from Saturday Night Live, William Shatner told a room full of Trekkies to "get a life." Like Shatner, highbrows tend to dismiss fan culture as […]
Most people consider anonymous sex in public places to be a crude, rude and immoral act. But "all that is rude ought not to be civilized with death," as Walter […]
If you're not a computer programmer, the name Bjarne Stroustrup might not mean that much to you. The creator of the coding language C++ isn't exactly a household name. But […]
Double blind peer-review in science and other fields has been the norm for decades. Now some scholars, as featured at the NY Times this week, are arguing that peer-review needs […]
I went to a wake earlier this week for the grandmother of a very close friend of mine. I had only seen his grandmother a few times in all the […]
Last week we talked about promiscuity and I gave you a chance to take a test to measure what psychologists call "sociosexuality"—which I referred to as promiscuity. When you took […]
A groundbreaking 1981 study that showed that it is not our physical state that limits us, but our mindset about our own limits, is set to feature in a movie starring Jennifer Aniston.
Facing a slow-motion food crisis the world should learn from Brazil, which reacted to its farm crisis with boldness, expanding production through science, not subsidies.
Mother Teresa, who would have turned 100 this week, helped spark a new missionary model which increasingly sees ordinary people volunteer while on vacation.
It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, writes Timothy Egan, but a culture of misinformation can have very serious consequences.
German city planners are hoping that applying "environmental psychology" will help make Hamburg's huge new urban development a success.