bigthinkeditor
The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on what you really want to be doing. Here are a few suggestions for finding ways to do what you love, and still pay the bills.
While science can improve our lives and cure disease, it can also be used for evil. Here are 25 experiments that destroyed lives, or have the potential to unleash doomsday.
With no War on Drugs there would be, within one generation, no “black problem” in the United States, says The New Republic, echoing England’s increasingly liberal drugs policies.
From the moment they entered the workforce in the 1960s, baby-boomers began to shape America’s economy and politics. They will do the same as they leave.
“The world doesn’t matter to us the way it used to,” say two philosophers who have written a book about the loss of traditional meaning in contemporary secular culture.
A lack of ambition plagues virtually every Western country. The ability to act has become shackled by a profound pessimism that does not exist in developing countries.
The only thing worse than being misperceived by a machine is being expertly perceived by one, says Walter Kirn about software that recommends the author books and movies.
Turning off mobile phones and avoiding the Internet can leave people suffering from symptoms similar to those seen in drug addicts trying to go cold turkey, researchers have found.
Frank Furedi takes to task Tariq Ramadan, “who wants to bury the Enlightenment virtue of toleration and replace it with recognition.” Can we seek meaning without a capacity to judge?
The European subspecies is slowly dying out, according to some. The blame should be laid firmly on the shoulders of emancipated women.
Erika Morphy tells retailers how now to be evil when selling and suggests other resolutions for navigating a tricky economy and cautious consumers.
What would Michel de Montaigne, the French author commonly credited with inventing the essay, think of the custom of making new year resolutions?
The American people rescued these six banks. They’ve all violated the law, and they’re all suspected of even more possible illegalities.
Depression is a major public health problem. Policymakers, treatment providers, and patients need unbiased research and responsible dissemination of information by the press.
The cosmetics industry has dragged its feet when it comes to developing alternatives to animal testing. Here they are again trying to stall new animal welfare laws.
There is a broader need for more individual scientists to communicate with the public. Currently, that kind of activity is not particularly valued in some fields of research.
We are not hapless victims of circumstances, we are deeply complicit in creating them. We are not stuck with global warming. We are global warming.
Misal embodies the type of person who will truly transform India: not an engineer or a financier, but an average person who refuses to be satisfied with the status he was born to.
Spiritually unmoored, many people nonetheless experience intense elevation during the magical moments that sport often affords, says David Brooks.
Every fad has its golden window, the period between Wow and Enough already. So it is with flash mobs, those hit-and-run performances that keep springing up.
U.S. politics, often decried for its “partisanship”, is all too bipartisan in its deeply dysfunctional consensus on tax and wealth, says Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Sachs.
We don’t look at Nature only from the light of reason. To look for explanations behind natural phenomena is, as Einstein remarked, akin to an act of devotion.
Newly published research suggests keeping a potential romantic partner guessing can pique his or her interest—mystery can be a powerful motivator of attraction.
“When we learn to tolerate boredom, we find out who we really are,” said one speaker at a recent conference on boredom who lamented our over-stimulated culture.
Our ultra-costly and ultra-punitive system is neither protecting victims nor rehabilitating lawbreakers. It’s time for a new and less costly approach, says Sunil Dutta.
The financial crisis has created an environment where, because of government-funded bailouts, big banks are getting bigger, as the small ones struggle.
Nearly two centuries after Tocqueville, both fear and hope still brood over the puzzle of America’s innermost nature, and America’s influence on the wider world.
The standard cosmological model holds that most of the matter in the universe remains missing in action; now a small but vocal group of cosmologists is challenging that model.
Richard Dawkins on his lifelong love of the King James Bible, which will be 400 years old next year: “Everyday speech is laced with biblical phrases from quotation to cliché.”
Nichi Vendola is one of the country’s most popular politicians, social-networking confident, adored by the young and might lead a leftish coalition in the next general election.