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Was Shakespeare gay? Stephen Greenblatt says that Shakespeare inhabited a world in which "it is much more possible to express homosexual passion and enact that passion without triggering a social crisis."
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Comedian Margaret Cho shares the story of the best mentor she ever had.
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Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt tells Big Think that Shakespeare inhabited a world in which "it's much more possible to express homosexual passion and inact that passion without triggering a social […]
There’s an indelible story in Jim Collins’ Good to Great about Admiral Jim Stockdale, a war hero who survived torture as a POW in Vietnam. From Collins’ book: “I never […]
In Part I, I introduced the idea that we should employ the principle of charity when engaging with ideas (particularly online) – especially from new and unknown interlocutors. Many problems […]
What's the Big Idea? As the K-12 school year starts up again in full force, it's worth asking: are American public schools really failing? According to the measure set by […]
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Educational historian Diane Ravitch explains why NCLB has failed, and what we can do about it.
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The legendary punk rocker offers some advice to today's youth.
The Democrats have a lot to cheer about after a terrific convention in Charlotte. God, however, is shaking her head. On Wednesday, Mitt Romney lambasted the Democrats for removing a […]
Thanks to a huge Kickstarter response, the Oculus Rift is ready to bring virtual reality technology back into gaming, motion sickness and all.
A recently-released line of state-of-the-art mainframes proves that, all these years later, IBM is still going strong in the Internet age.
Okay, not quite, but close: A new smart fabric, developed in Germany, can trigger an alarm when penetrated, and is flexible enough to be incorporated into building walls and floor coverings, among other materials.
I've written in the past about the Secret, more properly called the Law of Attraction, the perenially popular New Age idea which says that merely thinking about something draws it […]
What if you could bottle President Obama's famous cool, Lady Gaga's style and Michael Phelps's athleticism? An experimental philosopher is attempting to do just that. Sort of.
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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita argues that gerrymandering gives incumbents a wildly unfair advantage.
Numbers really are sexy. They are what will power our world for the foreseeable future. They are available like never before, and we know now how to use them wisely.
The line between man and machine is blurring to the extent that what previously seemed in the realm of science fiction is now science fact: humans with “super-abilities” who run faster, throw further, and hit harder than anyone else in the world.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” James Carville crowed throughout the 1992 presidential election, and has pretty much continued crowing since. What do you do when you know it’s the economy that […]
Several new apps represent the modern version of two cans connected by a tight string: Two (or more) smartphones, connected by the Internet.
A World War II veteran has created a wind turbine that hides its blades inside a drum-like structure so that birds and bats won't fly into them accidentally.