Big Think

What's the Big Idea?  The “tortured writer†has been Woody Allen-ized into a kind of embarrassing caricature. We picture him in a bare studio apartment, hunched over at a collapsing, secondhand card table, surrounded by crumpled up pieces of paper and possibly clutching at his furrowed brow ... Read More

Winning Entries to be Selected by Nathan Englander PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges Surprise! The Big Idea is . . . Future Food   What is this? an Iron Chef-style literary event. A glorious experiment. Wintertime fun ... Read More

The Baby Boomer generation that led America’s remarkable economic growth for so long is now a generation that is graying rapidly. America is already a nation of caregivers, with 1 in 8 Americans responsible for caring for an older person in their family. As the Baby Boomers start to retire and ... Read More

It has been a bad week for Mitt Romney. He did win both the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll and the Maine Caucus over the weekend. But neither of those results matter much. The winner of the CPAC straw poll is arguably determined by who can afford to pay registration fees for ... Read More

Earlier in the week, Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor found out that his name and the names of his father and grandfather were on a genealogical list kept by the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. Wiesel, and his family members had been selected to receive posthumous ... Read More

What's the Big Idea? What Wikipedia is not, according to Wikipedia: a paper encylopedia, a dictionary, a publisher of original thought. A soapbox. A means of self promotion. A link dump, social network, blog, textbook, manual, guidebook, newspaper, or crystal ball. It is also not a bureacracy, a ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? A small Utah company has seen the future of wireless data transfer and it comes in a spray can. ChamTech Operations has developed a mixture made of nanoparticles that can be sprayed on any vertical surface, from a light pole to a tree, to create powerful antennae ... Read More

      This space recently offered some thoughts about “The Ethics of Climate Change Denialâ€. The basic case was that denial which arises out of the innate subconscious urge we all have to adopt views that agree with our tribe, because of the importance of social cohesion, does not seem unethical ... Read More

 Filmmaker Shukree Hassan Tilghman wants to cancel Black History Month. “Isn’t segregation by month still segregation?†is a question Tilghman examines in his documentary More Than A Month that airs tonight on PBS. I’ve been wrestling with the same question this month myself, wondering if I may ... Read More

Our BIG THINKING friend Robert de Neufville is right to notice public opinion trending in favor of same-sex marriage.  And so it seems reasonable for him to predict that it will become legal everywhere in our country eventually. Particularly telling is the absence of opposition to same-sex ... Read More

What's the Big Idea? Imagine if you could live your life the way you watch a movie on a DVR. You could fast-forward through all the tedious moments and skip right to the good stuff. That was the premise of the 2006 sci-fi comedy Click, starring Adam Sandler. However, as Sandler's character ... Read More

Here at Mind Matters, we aren't big fans of militant atheism, or any other doctrine that prefers to explain away other views, rather than engaging them. I'm convinced that rhetorical chauvinism—the view that arguments that convinced you must convince everyone—is poison to civil society. Now and ... Read More