A Q&A With Dr. John L. Casti, author, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything Dr. John L. Casti is a complexity scientist. This is one of those job descriptions I would […]
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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.
It’s February 15th, and while some readers may have woken up this morning in a haze of romantic bliss, others will have spent the day asking their pets where it […]
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 […]
My research for Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence, Love, Sex, and Relationships wasn’t all orgasms in brain scanners. As I sifted through the scientific literature on love and sex, what I thought was a discussion about romance kept circling back around to decision-making.
Like many others I mistook the first John Carter trailer I saw for a Pepsi commercial. And like so many others, I did not go to see the film when it opened […]
If there’s a villain in Rosalind E. Krauss’ newest book, Under Blue Cup, it’s Marcel Duchamp. Art fell in the toilet with the dawn of Duchamp’s Fountain.
There’s a booming genre in wee books of things to see or do “before you die.” I don’t read these books, but Australian hospice nurse Bronnie Ware’s recently-published book, The […]
This article was previously published on AlterNet. For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became […]
One of the main reasons why performance art struggles to find a wider audience is because, almost by nature, it cannot reach a wide audience. A performance artist works in […]
Last night Frontline aired the film al-Qaeda in Yemen, which was reported by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad who writes for the Guardian and who, along with Declan Walsh when he was at […]
If there’s one trend that’s poised to take off and enter the mainstream in 2012, it’s 3D printing. Sometimes referred to as additive manufacturing, 3D printing is the process of taking […]
Welcome to Action In Action, a new column on Big Think that seeks to investigate and clarify the underlying structural causes of America’s economic, political, and social problems. Some background on […]
They should just rename Fox News the “Black Presidents Scare The Shit Out Of Us” network. If nothing else, Sean Hannity is consistent—he inundates the airwaves every day with “Obama […]
–Guest post by American University student Becca Stern. People are often scared of topics they do not understand, explain Matthew R. Hartings and Declan Fahy in their article “Communicating Chemistry […]
This essay was previously published on AlterNet. The death of Christopher Hitchens in December sparked an outpouring of tributes. Most of them praised his best qualities: his ferocious courage, his […]
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 […]
Deriding the Democratic Party’s “Julia” propaganda yesterday, Ross Douthat recycled a conservative truism. Unlike those admirable (because safely extinct) old-timeliberals, he wrote, today’s Democrats want the government to do what families should: “The liberalism […]
It’s a wonderful oddity—I hesitate to say “coincidence”—that the best erotic poem in literary history should appear smack dab in the middle of the Bible. The Song of Songs (known […]
1n 1947, Ukranian refugee Ihor Ševčenko wrote to England and persuaded George Orwell to authorize a Ukranian translation of Animal Farm. Over six decades later, writer Andrea Chalupa tracked down the story of this extraordinary man.
The latest Quinnipiac poll has Rick Santorum ahead of Mitt Romney 35-26 among Republicans and voters who lean Republican. National polls are not by themselves be good indicators of who […]
Want your child to be successful? Help her build self-control. Most middle-class children already receive enough cognitive stimulation to develop intelligence close to its full potential. In contrast, many children have room to increase their self-control.
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, […]
Surely the greatest scientific discoveries are the product of imaginative energy and curiosity no less intense or pure than that which animates Hamlet or King Lear. Still, the petty squabble between Reason and Imagination that began in the 17th century persists . . .
“Do you think we should get our brains scanned before getting married?” a friend asked me as we browsed a crowded department store, selecting important items for her bridal registry. […]
I’d like to tell you why Rick Santorum’s extreme religious views should be blamed for hampering his campaign’s performance on Super Tuesday, but I don’t believe that to be true. […]
This author explains convincingly that we haven’t been concerned enough with our children’s moral virtue—or acquiring the habits required to flourish as free and rational animals in a society such as ours. Aristotle, […]
The battle over Bisphenol A (BPA) rages on, and continues to teach lessons far beyond the particulars of the issue itself. Environmentalists argue that BPA (the supposedly dangerous chemical […]
Henry Rollins shares the DIY philosophy he learned from Abraham Lincoln and has always tried to follow.
It appears that Santorum’s time as a serious contender for the Republican nomination is about to come to a close. It’s true that the experts (including me) have wrongly counted […]