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5mins
At a White House gathering in early 2009, the administration bailed out the banking system without addressing the problems on Wall Street that caused the financial meltdown.
14mins
A conversation with MIT professor and Peter Institute for International Economics senior fellow.
5mins
Twitter or no Twitter, our social networks are basically as small and close as they were in ancient Rome.
7mins
To succeed in business, you don’t want to be too densely interconnected with entities that resemble you—or too diffusely linked to entities that don’t resemble you.
5mins
Influencing tastes across social networks is a tricky business: a love of "Love Actually" spreads differently than a love of "Pulp Fiction."
5mins
Social networks "magnify whatever they’re seeded with"—from germs to altruism to a diet of muffins and beer.
6mins
Like atoms in a molecule, we’re all linked together. Studying the complex matrix that results can illuminate everything from bucket brigades to Bernie Madoff.
2mins
The social networks we form add up to a giant "human superorganism."
31mins
A conversation with the Harvard physician and social scientist.
Today marks the first installment of Big Think's newest series, "Moments of Genius," sponsored by Intel. We sat down with math and science thought leaders—from the inventor of the very […]
Today Big Think is pleased to welcome the very talented Maria Popova, of Brain Pickings fame, to our regular blogging team. Known for "curating eclectic interestingness" from around (and beyond) […]
"The idea of America is that we all have our own unique voices...and that’s the same as guitar.Guitar is not an instrument that's stuck in a canon, or stuck in […]
4mins
Why has the "Life of Pi" author been sending novels to the Canadian prime minister?
2mins
What can be done to make boys and young men more interested in reading books?
1mins
When your novel gets a negative review, "it’s your entire being that is negated. And that hurts." But you have to learn to let it go.
5mins
There’s no formula to writing. The key thing is simply to read, says the novelist. "The best teacher is a cheap, little Penguin classic."
4mins
A tiny germ of an idea leads to research, which leads to further ideas and then more research. Eventually the writer has hundreds of pages of notes to work from.
4mins
Martel never bases his characters on real people—they're always a vehicle for something he wants to express.
8mins
The major religions have all had their excesses, but there’s something about spiritual thinking that augments a life.
10mins
Allegorical fiction can take very complex realities and convey them in powerful, emotional, psychologically accurate way.