Think Tank

What is the Big Idea? In a recent trip to a Costco in Manhattan, shoppers were seen pushing around large shopping carts filled with items like family-sized jars of mayonnaise and bulging packs of fluffy, colorful tube socks. Moms navigated congested aisles with their screaming children and ... Read More

What is the Big Idea? The backlash against U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra’s political attack ad is coming from all sides, including those in his own party. For those who missed it, the ad slams incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow’s foreign economic policies and depicts a young Asian ... Read More

Why do people hoard pets? Psychologists have explained the phenomenon as arising from early childhood experiences. Animals are often stable fixtures in an otherwise dysfunctional life.  Yet what if your cat makes you even more dysfunctional? An evolutionary biologist named Jaroslav Flegr argues ... Read More

"The most fecund population on the planet is the rural poor," Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler observe in their recent book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think . Demographers have found alarming birth rates in the developing world, and it is linked to what Diamandis and Kotler call the ... Read More

On China's microblogging site Weibo, rumors of Kim Jong-un's death surfaced earlier today when bloggers posted that he was assassinated in Beijing. Media outlets have yet to issue any official reports, but the rumors have spread to Twitter and they are ripe for punny jokes. Gawker was one of the ... Read More

If every student in the world had to take one required course, I would argue that course should be on classic Italian cinema. By that I mean the cinema of Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone and many ... Read More

I will never know if my vocation as a psychologist was a result of my early exposure to interesting gossip, or whether my interest in gossip was an indication of a budding vocation. Like many other Jews, I suppose, I grew up in a world that consisted exclusively of people and words, and most of the ... Read More

. . . is that it's a completely unreliable guide to decision making. Yet we tend to trust it implicitly, in ourselves and in others. This insight belongs to psychologist Daniel Kahneman - Nobel Prize winning cartographer of the human mind, and the author of Thinking, Fast, and Slow. Kahneman's ... Read More

Jason Silva is a transcendent man. As a filmmaker, philosopher, and futurist, Silva is always thinking big. Currently in the process of creating a feature length documentary, Silva has released a series of short clips that are attracting attention. The videos are sometimes under 2 minutes long, and ... Read More

It's not easy being an optimist in 2012. There's just too much to worry about: a global economic downturn, climate change, overpopulation, nuclear proliferation, failing education systems, you name it.  We are bombarded with bad news all the time, and we eagerly eat it up because our brains are ... Read More

The New York Giants won the Super Bowl and now they will get their parade down New York City's Canyon of Heroes. And yet, according to Paul Rieckhoff, there's another parade that's long overdue, and Rieckhoff is making noise about it.  The Defense Department has maintained that now is not the ... Read More

Enjoy the article, then check out the Big Think, Short Fiction Contest (#1: Sci Fi) - an Iron Chef-style event in partnership with Storiad.   The Unrealized Utopia of DIY Artistic Success There was a lot of unexamined fist-pumping among the youth of 1998 when Napster "took down" the music ... Read More

Move over, David Beckham, Matthew Broderick, Jerry Seinfeld and Donald Trump. The Super Bowl commercial that caught our attention was a Best Buy spot called "Phone Innovators" featuring none other than Big Think favorite Ray Kurzweil.  "I'm Ray Kurzweil," the futurist and inventor says in the ... Read More

What's the Big Idea? As the Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, Educational historian Diane Ravitch became known for her push to establish national standards for K-12 education. From 1997-2004, she served as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board ... Read More

What's the Big Idea? On June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD: “The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t,” he noted. Five years later, he was traded to the Yankees. Fourteen years later ... Read More