Guest Thinkers

Surprise, surprise. CNN and MSNBC viewers tend to be more concerned about climate change while Fox News viewers tend to be more doubtful.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my wife and I have for several years been attending a Unitarian Universalist church in the New York area. Unitarian Universalism is officially a […]

This has been a big week for the U.S. domestic airline industry and its embrace of environmentally-friendly biofuels. On Monday, a United Airlines jet completed the first-ever biofuel-powered commercial flight […]

So Tocqueville found two sources of the American devotion to universal education.  The first is the universal literacy that is a requirement for a country where everyone works for himself.  Being […]

Deron Durflinger, a high school principal in Van Meter, Iowa, says: We need a system that isn’t based on doing well on NAEP and PISA, but in which students are […]

A friend of mother’s, a lovely older woman, casually remarked recently that the only way she would consider dating again would be if she found a man willing to provide […]

I think it’s about time that we get rid of the idea that cheating is a bad thing per se. Generally speaking, cheating is nothing else than collaboration, something we […]

When Leonardo da Vinci painted at the court of Milan from 1482 through 1499, he contributed to the revolution in seeing we now know as the Renaissance. Lorenzo de’ Medici […]

The USB stick in your hand contains a zip file with your genome on it. You insert the drive into the side of your computer and click the button on the screen that says “Upload.” The machine spits out a prognosis. The secret to your very own personal happiness.

Ah retirement…you know the vision – vistas of long beaches, fairways, sunsets with umbrella drinks. Baloney. This imagery worked as an ideal for those who thought they might retire early […]

Craig Robinson, a conservative blogger who runs The Iowa Republican, didn’t mince words last week, calling Herman Cain a liar who is not willing to take responsibility for his actions. […]

You’ve probably had this experience thousands of times. You’re Googling, and you start typing in a question.  Google, like a jittery, over-zealous waiter, fills in the blank for you. Google […]

The professional debater William Lane Craig has been putting on a great show of offense lately that Richard Dawkins won’t debate him, complete with silly stunts like leaving an empty […]

So far we’ve concluded, following Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, that most of what we call higher education is really technical education.  It’s the acquisition of indispensable skills for […]

In our time of confined specialization, it’s hard to comprehend the multimedia talents of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poetry and painting helped shape the Victorian Age into the paradox-laden, hot […]

Like the Beatles discography or the screenplay for Casablanca, the King James Bible is a rare instance of true collaborative genius.

New research from the Mayo Clinic sheds light on the aging process and suggests that by removing old cells that can no longer divide, age-related disease can be slowed or stopped. 

Global emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide shot up in 2010. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that carbon dioxide emissions grew globally by 564 million tons, which is […]

Here’s a statement that I’m getting really tired of hearing: “We didn’t have computers when I was in school and I turned out okay. There’s no reason why kids today […]

On my old site, I had regular link roundups for all the stories I saw that interested me, but that I didn’t have the time to write about at greater […]

         You listen in on a conversation among your conservative friends. “You know what I HATE,” says Rick.  “I hate the government telling me what to do. I hate them […]

Over-reliance on foreign aid as opposed to tax revenue, says Sophal Ear, a leading expert on post-crisis economies, leads to corruption. 

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Churches Of Cain And Obama” attempts to explain the philosophical differences between these two men by examining the teachings of their […]

Big Think is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Hudson Union Society, which we hope will be a mutually beneficial arrangement to help foster our shared goal of […]

The way our brains act, it seems, is sensitive to the way we, their owners, think, from something as concrete to learning, the subject of the current study, to something as theoretical as free will.

Stan Richard’s insistence on strict rules may seem at odds with running a successful, creative advertising agency but his company has created some of our time’s most memorable ads. 

With the successful docking of its Tiangong space module and the Shenzhou-8 space craft this week – the so-called “Space Kiss” – China has shown the world that it is […]

The other day I came across this article from Bloomberg News, from which I learned something that surprised me: a large black market exists for human organs, in spite of […]

–Guest post by Jan Lauren Boyles, American University doctoral student. With looming austerity measures that would triple the cost of UK tuition hanging in the balance, Jon Offredo joined the throng of […]

Two articles have appeared recently on the topic of sperm snatching. The first is a new blog here at Big Think and the second is an article in yesterday’s Daily […]