Search
New technology platforms and lingering job shortages mean volunteering will be increasingly motivated by self-interest. So is it still volunteering? Or should we not worry about defining it?
20mins
This interview was originally broadcast live on bigthink.com on May 3, 2012. Newberg is a pioneer in the neuroscientific study of religious and spiritual experiences, or neurotheology. Here he discusses […]
Are the financial markets rational? It's a tough claim to make as share prices and bond yields zoom up and down during a single day, hour, or even second, sometimes […]
Andrew Cohen says narcissism is a culturally conditioned epidemic. How is it harmful and how can we break out of it?
Here's a quite engaging and very sensible interview with Bennett Foddy on the possibilities for and the ethics of life extension. I would put this philosophy professor in the moderately […]
“My earliest memory is of anxiety!” cartoonist Daniel Clowes tells an interviewer in The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, the first serious monograph of the work of this seriously […]
Remember the 1960s? It was a decade so radical that even the President of the United States could publically declare that public funding of contraceptives would increase economic prosperity. Lyndon […]
While he does not do drugs himself, Penn Jillette also does not believe other people should go to jail for "victimless crimes," pointing out that 1 in 6 people in prison in the U.S. today are "in there for weed."
Big-idea start ups are not dead, says GigaOm's Derrick Harris. They've just moved to the cloud, where scalable technology allows companies--and individuals--to innovate like never before.
I’ve always suspected, to paraphrase an adage from evolutionary science, that the marriage replicates the wedding. The wedding’s style is a germinal expression of the marriage to come, its strengths, […]
The preservation of individuals' online profiles after their physical death extends their life in a very meaningful sense, says Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes.
A quiet suburban street set in the leafy suburbs of Cheadle, Manchester, Northern England on Monday, witnessed a coming together of a former Leader of Manchester City Council, Labour MP Graham Stringer […]
A new tech start up wants to use a mobile app to create a worldwide network for real-time language translation. Its creators say the system is the next-best thing to the singularity.
Congress is apparently now speaking at a 10th grade level. The Sunlight Foundation recentlyanalyzed the Congressional Record and found that the average member of Congress speaks at 10.6 grade reading level on the […]
The first thing that came to mind when I finished Predator Nation, the book by Charles Ferguson that explains how Wall Street’s elite brazenly commit financial crimes out in the […]
Facebook banked $16 billion on its initial public offering, so why are market analysts disappointed? Perhaps because the company threatens the dominance of the stock market itself.
On Tuesday, May 22, I will be delivering a lecture as part of the National Academies' Sackler Colloquium on the "Science of Science Communication," reviewing the role of the media […]
The U.S. Navy's Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) is designed to crowdsource ideas and strategies to best meet future energy demands.
A Chinese flag, not an American one, will be planted in the lunar dust when the next manned mission to the moon occurs some time around 2025. Scientific teams in […]
2mins
Slavoj Zizek answers the question, "Do you think science has replaced philosophy in discovering the bigger questions of life?" Philosophy is not dying, he says -- in fact, we need […]