Jason Gots
Editor/Creative Producer, Big Think
Jason Gots is a New York-based writer, editor, and podcast producer. For Big Think, he writes (and sometimes illustrates) the blog "Overthinking Everything with Jason Gots" and is the creator and host of the "Think Again" podcast. In previous lives, Jason worked at Random House Children's Books, taught reading and writing to middle schoolers and community college students, co-founded a theatre company (Rorschach, in Washington, D.C.), and wrote roughly two dozen picture books for kids learning English in Seoul, South Korea. He is also the proud father of an incredibly talkative and crafty little kid.
The friendly side of North Korea. Men at sea, dancing! Monty Python, of course, and more!
Our modern-day Kafka on his new novel Lake Success and the dark comedy that in 2018 pretty much writes itself
Why would two intelligent women running a hugely successful podcast at one of the most respected studios in the audio world quit to risk everything on a technology almost nobody understands?
Man Booker prize winners Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft on maps that lead nowhere, plasticized anatomies, and humor across national borders.
A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. Jill Lepore, author of THESE TRUTHS, on the political divide, public shaming, and the future of democracy.
How a mother-daughter obsession became a massive and dangerous industry. The weird history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
A seismic shake-up at a venerable literary gatekeeper. Shallow and not-so-shallow consumerism. The Paris Review’s new editor on old ghosts, new voices, and what’s worth keeping.
A seismic shake-up at a venerable literary gatekeeper. Shallow and not-so-shallow consumerism. The Paris Review’s new editor on old ghosts, new voices, and what’s worth keeping.
Congo is one of the most culturally diverse, mineral rich, and beautiful places on Earth. But the “heart of darkness” colonizers dreamed into being still bleeds. Daniel McCabe’s documentary This is Congo lets this wounded nation speak for itself.
In Egypt, comedy can be a matter of life and death. But life in America’s no cakewalk either. Political satirist Bassem Youssef on reinventing yourself, crossing cultural lines, and the future of space exploration.
When you’re a Hasidic woman in Borough Park, Brooklyn, starting an ambulance corps is a radical act. Documentary filmmaker Paula Eiselt on the push-pull of identity and cultural change in her film 93Queen.
On hallucinating a teensy Virgin Mary in a water fountain, our weird relationship to fame, her stint as an elf-hunting camp counselor, and more in what feels like a 4 am college conversation with the inimitable Parker Posey.
Do not succumb to “funklessness”. Join us as we nerd out to a staggering degree on utopian afrofuturism, David Bowie, and the sci-fi-inflected music of the ‘70s. With Jason Heller, Hugo-award winning author of Strange Stars.
Think Again like you’ve never heard it before. A trip deep into the oldest living folk music in the Western world — that of Epirus, Greece — and what it reveals about why we make music at all.
In her vivid, dreamlike new book of short stories, Florida is a humid, seething organism that wants to eat you. Snake-infested. Full of sinkholes. A thing to resist, get lost in, surrender to, and sometimes, temporarily escape.
Maybe everything we do is bad. But it’s not all bad to the same extent. Writer Jonathan Safran Foer on factory farming and free-range parenting in 2018.
Guns as currency. Guns as status. Guns as the power of the unpredictable. Stanford Historian Priya Satia on how we got where we are today.
Humanity is on the move. Fleeing war, oppression, poverty . . . millions worldwide leave their home countries daily in search of asylum. IT WILL BE CHAOS filmmakers Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo on what this means for Europe and the world.
While figuring out how to steer her own creative ship, Jessica Abel has learned powerful, practical lessons about how to help others do the same.
Walking all over the English countryside picking up trash, the genitalia of the spotted hyena, and many other subjects comical and deadly serious.
The moral bankruptcy of the European Union, the backlash against Steven Pinker’s defense of progress, and where we go from here.
Hanging out with a bat vs. being a bat. Why ‘titanic’ artists are too big to float. Bob Dylan’s very worst song, and more.
By putting its relationships in military hands, the US is losing its power abroad.
Ruinophilia. The science of loneliness. Live at UntitledTown Book and Author Festival, Green Bay, Wisconsin
If you’ve ever heard that there are differences between the “left and right brain”, you can blame Michael Gazzaniga. His new work aims at closing the gap between the meat of the brain and the magic of consciousness, and maybe saving us a lot of future headaches.
Where do cultures come from? The answer is as old as life itself.
God, guns, sex, and mutually exclusive concepts of liberty. The Way Brothers’ Netflix docuseries Wild, Wild Country tells a story that’s about as American as it gets.
Love is like umami. Adulthood is accepting the schmo you are. Wordplay and worldbuilding with novelist Meg Wolitzer.
There’s got to be a thousand ways to reclaim the past, but for Tara Westover, story was the only one that could contain all of it.
We are all of us held together by words.