bigthinkeditor
An expert on constitutional law at the University of Berkeley says yesterday’s ruling against California’s same-sex marriage ban could ultimately undermine broader gay rights objectives.
Reality TV concerns its viewers with artificial status, confuses celebrity for infamy, and has a tendency toward violence and moral depravity. Welcome to the circus, says Christine Rosen.
When evidence for a conspiracy theory falls short, an opportune moment to study cognitive dissonance arises as followers easily find ‘proof’ for an alternative explanation.
Scientists have developed a video game that allows players to predict and build protein structures that have stumped computers because of their inadequate spatial reasoning.
As marijuana legalization moves closer to being a legitimate political topic, the issue could divide the Tea Party along its libertarian and social conservative lines, says The Atlantic.
Hip hop legend and Big Think expert, Wyclef Jean may soon add the title of president to his list of accomplishments. The former Fugee is expected to announce his bid for […]
Today we introduce our newest blog, Dollars and Sex, written by Marina Adshade, an economics professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There she teaches a popular undergraduate course […]
Interior design star Thom Filicia just stopped by the Big Think offices to tell us a thing or two about good taste and what it takes to be a tastemaker. […]
While many minorities in our society face discrimination, being gay is a little different, according to GLAAD President Jarret Barrios. “You don’t wear that on your sleeve,” says Barrios. “It’s […]
PepsiCo Social Media director Bonin Bough thinks that CEOs who are comfortable on Twitter and Facebook can really help their companies out. “You look at a guy like Tony [Hsieh] […]
While psychologists have preferred the term ‘blended family’ to ‘broken home’, true blending rarely occurs in second-marriages. Fracture at home is becoming a tolerable reality of modern families.
“Making nice doesn’t work. It was worth a try, but it didn’t work. So we’d better try something else.” A Methodist Sunday school teacher proposes standing up to inaction over climate change.
Critics who say WikiLeaks has blood on its hands over the release of Afghan war logs are hypocritical because they ignore the actors who more directly split Afghan and coalition blood.
While nearly every social movement claims Enlightenment ideas—freedom, democracy and science—as their own, this very claim to authority cuts against the revolutionary English moment.
By measuring a subject’s brain waves, researchers at Northwestern University can detect the presence of “concealed information”. The technique could be used to uncover terrorist plots.
Einstein once declared that he had no special talents, only he was passionately curious. What makes us want to know about things we don’t understand? The urge may be primal, scientists say.
A series of online tests known as Implicit Association Tests measure subconscious bias in areas of race, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Follow the link to try.
Ahead of what is expected to be a boom in e-book sales, Amazon and Apple are accused of colluding to fix the price of electronic books depriving the market of competition.
As the science conference at Google HQ wraps up, the New Scientist reflects on some big ideas—from jet packs to the nature of time and gravity—presented in humble surroundings.
Elizabeth Wurtzel says cynics should embrace the Ground Zero Mosque as a bargaining chip: evidence of America’s tolerance to be held up as proof positive of our goodwill.
Could recycling actually be hurting the environment? In a recent policy paper, “Recycling Myths Revisited”, Professor Daniel K. Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) […]
Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), visited the Big Think offices today to talk about veterans issues and the announced drawback from Iraq. Rieckhoff stressed […]
Despite what the brainiacs from the Ivy League say, citizen’s arrests are not vigilante acts, according to Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. In fact, he insists that they have been […]
Diane Johnson at The New York Review of Books draws on five books to write about the current state of marriage in the U.S. which has the most marriages per capita in the West.
“Two years after the US subprime crisis, China is seeing its own real estate bubble as a result of massive state stimulus programs. Many economists are warning it could burst soon.”
Our insistence that luxury goods be genuine is unrelated to how the product functions, say psychologists. We demand authenticity because of an emotional attachment to a brand.
Air conditioning, sometimes necessary and sometimes about status, has made it possible for us to live almost anywhere in the world, but its effects on the environment are “chilling”.
The 75th anniversary of Social Security provides a moment to strengthen young people’s awareness of the program so they will be more active in supporting its reform.
“If there is one true religion in the US, it leads us to worship at the altar of technology.” The Guardian says only a cultural shift will deliver us from future disasters like those of BP and Toyota.
“The idea of a semantic web was proposed over a decade ago. Now a triumvirate of internet heavyweights—Google, Twitter and Facebook—are making it real,” says the New Scientist.