bigthinkeditor

Video and photo editing, smartphone apps, email and other digital tools are gaining popularity as parents try to persuade their 21st-century kids that there is a Santa Claus.

Who did we under-appreciate in 2010? In the endless whirr of 24/7 corporate news, the people who actually make a difference are often trampled in the stampede.

Butler “challenged the status quo, looking at what could be achieved in later life, not at what might be lost,” writes Richard Hodes, Director of the National Institute on Aging.

Ryan Chin, of MIT’s Smart Cities group writes that while Mitchell was perhaps the world’s leading urban theorist, he was also a great mentor and advocate for students.

The father of fractal geometry “was one of the most visionary mathematicians from the latter part of the twentieth century,” writes Boston University professor Robert Devaney.

The key to understanding the enduring relevance of the speech is to focus on what Ike actually said and to understand what motivated the general for much of his adult lifetime.

A fake pill can make patients feel better, even when they know it’s nothing but inert ingredients, according to a new study where patients knew they were receiving a sugar pill.

By intensely focusing the sun’s rays on a rare earth oxide, researchers have discovered a reactor that could produce fuel from water in an easily stored form.

The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the caliber of their scholarship, says Simon Head.

It’s been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the academic Richard Dawkins and the essayist Christopher Hitchens, believers have hit back.

If you want to know what industry will power the next U.S. economy, follow the money. Where are investors really looking? And where is research and experimentation really happening?

The Mexican government has been using the army to fight the nation’s drug cartels for about four years. It isn’t working. Some critics say the army is part of the problem.

One is a gadget-maker, the other a search engine—but now Apple and Google are at odds. Robert Lane Greene reports on how each company requires a different leap of faith.

The best way to face the future and tackle diet-related problems is to arm people with knowledge and skills. The Economist compiles the year’s best dietary advice.

Christmas is one night that is allowed to rip itself from the continuum and to exist all on its own, a mystery and damnation to all the clocks ticking away below.

We can all simplify our traditions and distill our expectations to their essence: a time of joy and peace. Adele Stan says she found the true meaning of Christmas by not celebrating it.

2010 was the year good old-fashioned, blame-it-on-the-breeding-masses overpopulation theory re-entered the mainstream. There’s just too many Malthusians, says Tim Black.

Behind our destructive system of unbridled capitalism is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Let’s celebrate it and help it grow in the future, says Rebecca Solnit.

Hot on the heels of a series of international U.F.O. sighting disclosures, the New Zealand government has joined the party and made public 2,000 pages of U.F.O. eyewitness accounts.

The Spanish House of Representatives has rejected new legislation under which hundreds of file-sharing sites that are currently perfectly legal, could have been shut down.

What’s the difference between new ideas that are good, and those that are merely novel? Professor Alan Jacobs insists on asking moral questions as technology progresses.

No more will soldiers’ vision be limited to the socket-embedded spheres that God intended. The Pentagon wants troops to see dangers coming at them from all directions.

One thing a school might be doing in generally educating the student is teaching him or her appropriate patterns of responsible civic behavior, says Harvard professor Sean Kelly.

It may not feel like it in the West, but this is, in many ways, the best of times. Optimism is on the move—with important consequences for both the hopeful and the hopeless.

Perhaps being a procrastination addict isn’t such a bad thing. There may be surprising benefits to putting things off, says Columbia Business School professor Eric Abrahamson.

Influencers are what makes the greentech industry world go round, so here are the 10 individuals that have had the biggest effect on the greentech sector this year.

James Cameron’s Avatar was the highest-grossing film of all time last year. This year it can boast a new accolade: it was the film illegally downloaded most often.

Don’t underestimate the significance of China’s rise. We are living through the biggest shift in wealth, power, and prestige since the Industrial Revolution.

Anosognosia is an intriguing neuropsychological syndrome in which a patient with one or more paralysed limbs denies they have anything wrong with them. A form of Freudian defense?

Credit rating agencies have too much power to determine the fate of nations. They are unelected, unaccountable, have hugely inflated powers and should be curbed.