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Megan Erickson
Associate Editor, Big Think
Megan Erickson is an Associate Editor at Big Think. Prior to Big Think, she taught reading and writing to ninth and tenth graders in NYC public schools and tutored students of all ages at the Stuyvesant Writing Center, which she helped launch. In her spare time, she worked in the communications department at the Center for Constitutional Rights and served as a mentor at the Urban Assembly, where she designed and led an extracurricular civics course on grassroots community action. She’s written on education, small business, and the arts for CNNMoney, Fortune Small Business, and The Huffington Post. Megan received her master’s degree in Education from Teachers College. You can reach her at megan@bigthink.com.
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What’s the Big Idea? If you’ve ever shopped, socialized, or signed up for anything online, there’s a chance that information you offered up willingly, in a seemingly private context, is […]
Two weeks ago, we published, “Is Brain Science Just Hype?,” our interview with Swarthmore professor of psychology Barry Schwartz. The author of The Paradox of Choice and Practical Wisdom (two of the most-watched TED Talks ever), […]
What’s the Big Idea? In her essay “Outfox Them!” in the March 8th edition of the London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick, an Australian-American historian of Soviet Russia, tells an […]
Today, the question of how people make decisions is an animated and essential one, capturing the attention of everyone from neuroscientists to lawyers to artists. In 1956, there was one person in all of New York known for his work on the brain: Harry Grundfest. An aspiring psychiatrist, Eric Kandel chose to take an elective in brain science and found himself studying alongside Grudfest at Columbia University.
Brain imaging studies show that every time we learn a new task, we're changing our brain by expanding our neural network.
Google versus Facebook. Silicon Valley versus Hollywood. Wall Street versus Main Street. Increasingly, the rivalries and alliances that define our lives have nothing to do with kings, queens, or Congress. What we’re witnessing is a fundamental shift in the way our society is organized.
Information is power. The Internet has made it possible to share and spread information faster than ever before. Unprecedented levels of access to information means that democracy is bound to take root and flower in even the most authoritarian corners of the world -- right? Not necessarily, says MacKinnon.
James Cameron’s films may all cover wildly different terrain — the distant, futuristic planet Pandora in Avatar, an ill-fated Edwardian-era passenger liner in Titanic, and an alien-embattled underwater oil platform in […]
We all know them: parents whose children run wild in public, allowed to behave in ways that make the rest of us cringe and calculate privately how we can avoid […]
Diane Ravitch tells Big Think what really matters when it comes to learning, inside schools and out. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it's not K-12 teachers who are most responsible.
Read ’em and weep. Or just add your own ideas at the bottom of this post. 1. Julian Schnabel. Bombastic, prolific, self-promotional, and grandiose, Schnabelwas the ethos of 1980’s NYC writ large […]
The Future Attribute Screening Technology project (FAST) was not dreamed up by Philip K. Dick, but it could have been. Lead by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the initiative aims […]
What’s the Big Idea? There’s a revolution going on in neuroscience, says science writer Kayt Sukel, and it’s happening on two fronts. One way the science is changing: researchers are […]
What’s the Big Idea? Happy International Women’s Day! This is the first of many events throughout the month which focus on celebrating the historic achievements of women around the world, […]
What’s the Big Idea? Peggielene Bartels was an administrative assistant in Washington D.C. when she got a phone call informing her she’d been elected King of Otuam, the Ghanian fishing […]
Lighten up, says Bill Nye aka The Science Guy. The idea is to get people to embrace science, not force it.
Update: This interview has been rescheduled for April. You may still submit your questions below! Dylan Ratigan, the host of MSNBC’s highest rated non-primetime show, will be here in our […]
What’s the Big Idea? Without realizing it, James Cameron has produced a parable about all forms of human communication, says David Bellos, a renowned translator and finalist for the 2012 National […]
“If you can’t say Fuck, you can’t say, Fuck the government.” — Lenny Bruce In this video, Lenny Bruce excoriates the cultural impulse to censor “dirty words” over violent images, which […]
What’s more offensive than crushed heads and mangled limbs? Exposed female nipples, according to Facebook’s criteria for deleting user content, published for the first time on Gawker two weeks ago.