In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
Search Results
You searched for: Will Wilkinson
What matters in life? Will Wilkinson wrote wrote a nice Big Think post on Friday quoting some recent psychological research and suggesting the answer is “memorable social experience”: A number […]
President Obama apparently thinks the safer way to justify higher taxes on the super rich is to pitch the proposal based on its deficit-reduction potential. But if he wants to get the ball rolling for meaningful tax reform, Obama will summon his rhetorical powers to explain how the Buffett Rule could help reduce the nation's massive and destructive wealth inequality.
A little science-fiction philosophy to provoke you to remember on Memorial Day, courtesy of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit: Suppose you were given the chance to teleport yourself, Star Trek style, […]
Ned Resnikoff picks up on my old post, via a terrific recent one by Daniel Little, on the radicalism of John Rawls’ position on economic liberty: If we’ve to fairly […]
The United States of America murdered an innocent man. But this is not the main reason we should be against capital punishment. Carlos DeLuna was put to death in 1989 […]
I started a version of this post a couple weeks ago, but since then the dispute between libertarians about the place of “social justice” in their philosophy has become white-hot, […]
People tend to see their ideological affiliation as constitutive of their identity in a way their opinion about, say, the ontology of mental illness isn't.
President Obama said Monday that overturning the Affordable Care Act would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step.” But by all accounts oral argument in the Supreme Court went badly for supporters […]
Last Friday, I posted a piece in The Stone at The New York Times suggesting the work of philosopher John Rawls as an intellectual touchstone for the Occupy Wall Street […]
“If you want to replenish your visual thinking, you have to go back to nature,” David Hockney says in Bruno Wollheim’s film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, “because there’s the […]
While America has always led the world in supporting new entrepreneurs and launching innovative new companies, the democratization of the Internet over the past decade means that we are all […]
Batman is wrong to be nonlethal in the case of the Joker. This shows we can, in some cases, morally kill someone against his will. I am something of a […]
T.M. Scanlon’s response to my reply to his short essay on liberty and libertarianism offers a nice chance for me to add some of what I couldn’t fit in my […]
Following Julian Sanchez‘s lead, I’ve argued that now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns — rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage […]
One of the bad things about having a smart phone is, I can now scroll through the headlines of the New York Times before I get out of bed. This […]
NASA’s $150-million, Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe (WMAP) has been gathering information about the nature of our Universe for nine years and has changed the way we think about it forever. […]
Compact fluorescent light bulbs are a fantastic energy-efficient alternative to standard incandescent ones, but let’s face it – they’re rather unfortunate-looking. Until now. From British human-centric gadget company Hulger and designer […]
Two English health scholars have written a book called 'The Spirit Level' which locates the cause of social ills in income inequality. The Boston Review unpacks their arguments.
On April 24, investigative reporter Brooks Jackson and UPenn professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson are set to release a new book that is sure to be of interest to Framing Science […]
Daniel Wilkinson and Nik Steinberg write that the U.S. embargo of Cuba must end, but that it is naive to think that the Caribbean country's government will suddenly reform as a result.
Stanford economics professor John Taylor has some ideas about the financial crisis. For one, he doesn’t believe that the Fed could have done much more than they did during the […]
For this week’s installment of What Went Wrong? we bring you an interview with the Nobel Prize winning economist, Vernon Smith. Having studied bubbles inside and out, he has said […]
Something big lies beyond the visible edge of our universe, according to the largest analysis to date of galaxy clusters.
For this week’s installment of What Went Wrong?, we bring you the media perspective from Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times columnist and author of “Too Big To Fail,” and […]
As part of the third week of Big Think’s series “What Went Wrong?,” the Former CEO of BB&T John Allison discusses the role of governmental policies in creating the housing […]
Over the next few months, Big Think is rolling out a series of interviews with leading economics experts to analyze the financial crisis and answer some pressing questions: Who’s to […]
Today’s interviews with Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Richard Shelby mark the final installment of What Went Wrong?, Big Think’s series on the financial crisis. Over the past few months, we sat […]