History
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Instead of differentiating people on the basis of their “religion” (as Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc.), what if we differentiated people according to their temporal orientation? We could divide people into Pasters, Presentists, and Futurians. Let’s see what happens. Pasters. These are people ... Read More
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What's the Big Idea? Is the Internet making us stupid? Will our capacity for contemplation be fried by the minute-to-minute updates of Facebook, Twitter, and instant messaging? Actually, no, says James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. The Internet has ... Read More
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What's the Big Idea? Before neuroscience and quantum physics, there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The 19th century German idealist revolutionized Western thought, and every great thinker since has been working in his shadow, says Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic ... Read More
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Today we're pleased to announce our second Big Think Book of the Month, the dazzlingly ambitious Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism , out May 22, 2012 from Verso Books. Slavoj Žižek has been called "the most dangerous philosopher in the West" for his analysis of ... Read More
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The blind 40-year-old Chinese dissident who escaped from house arrest in April — improbably evading guards, finding his way to the U.S. embassy in Beijing and, after a diplomatic fracas, acquiring a visa to study law in the United States — landed at Newark Liberty airport on Saturday. Less than a ... Read More
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What's the Latest Development? Yale philosophy professor Shelly Kagan is pretty sure death is a bad for a person but he can't put his finger on the precise reason. Take these two different scenarios: (1) Your friend is about to begin a 100 year space mission and, even more dramatic, radio ... Read More
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Votifi is an online platform that encourages positive, nuanced political exchange. After you sign up, the website sends you daily polls through your browser or mobile device and creates a political profile of you based on your responses. The site also breaks down basic political issues and ... Read More
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What's the Latest Development? Due to some rather strict physical constraints, the kind that come when working with atoms, we have nearly reached the limits of computing power, says High Performance Computing expert Thomas Sterling. The last major computing milestone was achieved in 2008 when ... Read More
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The cover headline caught my eye, and I surprised both the elderly leafletter and myself when I took a copy of the “Watchtower” magazine on my way out of the subway station this morning. Religion and politics is one of my favorite subjects. What do the Jehovah’s Witnesses have to say? What ... Read More
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What's the Big Idea? Just before he was elected in 2008, Obama noted an urgent need for politicians to give up “polarizing debate” and get things done. Across-the-aisle collaboration was to be one of the guiding forces behind his presidency. Two weeks after he took office, the New York Times ... Read More
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What should Democrats compromise on this year? Absolutely nothing, says Van Jones. Read More
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The troubling chronicle of blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has me thinking about the trial of another dissident who faced a life-changing dilemma of his own 2411 years ago in ancient Athens. Chen, like Socrates, is a gadfly on the hide of his polity. Where Socrates was condemned for ... Read More
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If I were asked, “do you believe that human beings evolved millions of years ago from ancestors shared in common with gorillas and chimpanzees?” I would answer emphatically and unequivocally: yes. But I know very little about evolutionary biology. Why am I so emphatic and unequivocal if I am so ... Read More
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Today as I meditate on Arum and Roksa's much-discussed study, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” my thoughts turn to academic life at the institution where I teach. This week in my colleague’s advanced Latin class, students are reading Exodus in the Vulgate and hunting ... Read More
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What's the Latest Development? Many websites and blogs that catalog our contemporary (electronic) era could be lost by the time historians wish to investigate their content as clues to what our time was like. Stored data decay over time. NASA, for example has lost data from its earlier moon ... Read More
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My Tuesday post examined parents’ limited options in the age of the standardized test. But what is a teacher to do who is fed up with the testing regime? “I’d prefer not to” may work for Bartelby but won’t fly in a public school. Nor will resistance to the test prep regime. This year, 3rd, 4th ... Read More
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What's the Latest Development? A new study out of Denmark suggests that the proximity of supernovae explosions to our solar system has greatly affected the success of life on Earth. Looking at how frequently the sun encountered open star clusters as it moved through a spiral arm in the Milky Way ... Read More
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These are heady days for my 7-year-old daughter. She won’t be sitting in her New York City public school classroom much at all this week. Instead, she and her second-grade classmates are swimming at the YMCA, visiting a Dutch farmhouse in Brooklyn, taking a field trip to South Street Seaport in ... Read More
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What's the Latest Development? Famed biologist E.O. Wilson believes that the gulf between art and science—one celebrates the limits of human perspective while the other seeks to overcome them with instrumentation—can only be bridged by understanding what mental processes inspire us to create ... Read More
