Technology & Innovation — May 12, 2010

Google Saves the News?

Some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about ways to work with publishers and save quality journalism and information content.

bigthinkeditor

Having helped break the news business, Google now wants to fix it—”for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to.” James Fallows looks at how some of the smartest minds at the company are working with publishers to address this issue and mapping out the future of journalism.

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Guest Thinkers

Fashionable Godlessness

David B. Hart writes that the “New Atheism” has “proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment.”