Search
bigthinkeditor
Read Less
Out-of-control Jersey Shore cast member Snooki reveals the ever-shrinking gap in America between who we are and how we broadcast ourselves to the world, Max Fisher considers.
Cancer cells love sugar. More specifically, fructose and glucose fuel pancreatic cancer cell growth. More reason to rein in your sugar consumption, says Conner Middelmann Whitney.
Quality, not cost, is the reason companies cite for their increasing investment in open source software, says Amy Vernon in a report on an Accenture survey.
As the German military pays $5,000 to every family that lost a member in an airstrike in Afghanistan, Spiegel looks at how much the life of a dead civilian is worth.
Are many of the unemployed stupidly and stubbornly holding out for a higher wage than they can get? Tyler Cowen says no but that many do not face an easy adjustment.
Explaining our predisposition to religious belief, just as scientists can explain taste and perception of color, does not make it a nonsense, says neuroscientist Michael Graziano.
Karl Walling, the strategy professor falsely accused online of advocating rape in a lecture, considers the cost of protecting academics from such outrages.
Scientists are finding that what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers fresh insight into how we anthropomorphize our perceptions into a revealing saga of ourselves.
Ohio State University law professor Douglas A. Berman says everyone affected by society’s laws ought to have a right to vote—even if they have to mail in their ballot from […]
Michael Stone is an expert on evil. A forensic psychiatrist and professor at Columbia, Stone has cataloged and classified evil acts into a 22-point scale for his show on the […]
In describing economic growth, some economists ask how much our mental states have to do with how the economy functions. Trust, for example, is heralded as a necessity for transactions to occur.
Besides dampening the spirit, when a person experiences racist thoughts and feelings, stress hormones rush the body, the heart pumps harder and the blood vessels constrict.
While scientists often leave their religious beliefs at the door, it is much harder to abandon one's philosophical beliefs, which are equally unproven yet influence science to a high degree.
The error of the Chicago school was that it fixed reality around its economic theories of the rational consumer and producer. We should begin with irrational reality and proceed from there.
As metaphors for the mind go, one researcher at Stanford says our brains function much more like search engines than computers. We are more probabilistic than deterministic, she says.
Why did modernism skip England? One academic asks why a people so close to the Second World War cling to their outmoded literary traditions while the world around them has progressed.
Public intellectual and Postwar European historian Tony Judt should be remembered for his consummate political stance: an ardent defense of the welfare state until his last moments.
156 years since Thoreau published 'Walden', his criticism of technology remains as vital as ever. Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic says we need reminding how to use technology well.
Fats, oils and grease are increasingly reprocessed into biofeuls, a method that was put on display when a giant butter sculpture of Benjamin Franklin was melted and made into diesel.
The net neutrality framework laid out by Google and Verizon exempts wireless networks from rules that would govern broadband service and allows providers to set up Internet 'toll lanes'.