bigthinkeditor

You may say your dream holiday would be trekking in a rainforest or white-water rafting but new research shows most of us are less daring than we think and prefer being beach-side.

Can Western liberal capitalism learn to coexist with other styles, like those of China, India and Brazil’s swiftly developing economies? It can — and it must.

Jon Cohen’s new book reminds us that, for all the claims that apes and human beings are ‘98.5 per cent the same’ in terms of genetics, there is still an unfathomable gap between us.

Walter Kohl, son of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, has published a tell-all book describing in moving detail his lonely childhood and the rift with his father.

The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power.

In an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet.

Quit slouching—others may see you as weak! A recent study published in Psychological Science says posture plays an important role in how we perceive power in those around us.

The fallibility of eye-witness memory is well documented. But what about people’s memories of their own past intentions? This is an issue in memory research with real-life implications.

Indian executives pride themselves on things that set their country apart from China: democracy, a reliable legal framework for investors and a widespread command of English.

A new study has found that having an abortion does not put a woman at risk for mental health problems. But you know what does? Having a baby.

While social media has afforded us many things, it’s also given the uncanny ability for a single person to become many different people. All at the same time.

We live in a time of high-tech miracles. But, as world ruler, I’d strive to direct all that creativity towards servicing our need for more truth, more transparency, and more wisdom.

Longer words tend to carry more information, according to research by a team of cognitive scientists. That might sound intuitively obvious, until you start to think about it.

Small companies can now deploy technology that was previously reserved for large organizations so that nearly any employee can now work from anywhere.

The complexity of our 21st century problems has not just led to a postponement in peak creativity. It has also lessened the importance of the individual.

What kind of value can living well have? The analogy between art and life has often been drawn and as often ridiculed. We should live our lives, the Romantics said, as a work of art.

The powers that be are currently convening at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But is this high-profile meeting of minds really the best setting for predicting and responding to the world’s future crises? Or does it fall prey to the same biases that triggered the recent recession in the first place?

Vladimir Nabokov, popular author and self-taught expert on butterflies, once put forth a theory of evolution for the Polyommatus blues butterfly. Today, his theory is getting some attention.

The girlie-girl culture being marketed to little girls is less innocent than it might seem, and can have negative consequences for girls’ psychological, social and physical development.

The Enlightenment left us with few resources for thinking about what the good life really is, and how we should live it, because the focus was on winning individuals their freedom.

Inspired by Tunisia, Egyptians began their protests online and then added hard tactics on the ground in their effort to bring down a crushingly effective police state.

Once upon a time, films would open, close, appear on video, then vanish. Now with dozens of television channels to fill and rentals going postal, some films never go away.

U.S. Supreme Court justices have ruled that corporations are “artificial persons”; the Spanish Parliament ruled that great apes are “legal persons.” So just what is a person these days?

What people are saying to each other is important, but how they are saying it may be even more telling. A new study finds that people who speak in similar styles are more compatible.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s nearly two-year examination of the 2008 crisis lays blame on two presidential administrations, regulatory agencies and big players on Wall Street.

Professor of the “social studies of science” at M.I.T., Sherry Turkle summarizes her new view with eloquence: “We expect more from technology and less from each other.”

If there was a central theme to the president’s remarks, it was innovation. He called for more investment in education, research, science and clean energy.

The global recession pushed climate change action toward the bottom of the geopolitical agenda. Yet President Obama bucked conventional wisdom Tuesday night by making  clean energy technology a centerpiece of his State of the Union Address. 

Autism sufferers unquestionably have feelings. It’s processing them—and reading others’—that they struggle with.

Why do we underestimate others’ misery while knowing most of our own negative experiences happen in private, and we frequently put on a brave, happy face when socializing?