Search Results

Spontaneous talk on surprise topics. Psychologist Paul Bloom wants us to abandon empathy as a guide to moral decision making. He’s probably right. 

What does primate pornography tell us about human nature?

Are people naturally good or evil? How much of our mental life is unconscious? Are our desires hard-wired by evolution? On the evening of Monday, March 21st, renowned psychologist and […]

A conversation with the AIDS physician.

“The main argument here is that pleasure is deep,” Paul Bloom writes early on in his new book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We […]

As the son of journalists, Paul Barrett assumed journalism was “what people did when they got older.”

Quantum uncertainty and wave-particle duality are big features of quantum physics. But without Pauli’s rule, our Universe wouldn’t exist.

To answer that question, we may have to figure out when the famed painter started to go bald.

By the time John Paul DeJoria founded John Paul Mitchell Systems, he’d already sold encyclopedias on commission door-to-door, and he understood the importance of persistence in the face of rejection. […]

The world of particle physics sure does have surprises, even for the most educated of physicists out there. If you ever take a visit to the physical site of CERN, where […]

The Seattle tech magnate died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

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.

In the glamor-filled world of drag queens, fashion and “ethical self-fashioning” might be closer than we think. 

Spontaneous talk on surprise topics. Writer Paul Theroux on tyrannical mothers, colonizing Mars, and an important difference between humans and cockroaches. 

What would you do? Imagine you’re a politically conservative, devoutly religious art dealer fleeing your war-torn country when you suddenly see art radically unlike anything you’ve seen before. Do you stay the course or gamble on this next “big thing”? Now add the sudden death of your pregnant young wife, which leaves you with five children under the age of nine whose futures now depend entirely on your choices. Do you roll the dice with your life and theirs? If you’re Paul Durand-Ruel and that artist is Claude Monet, the original Impressionist, you don’t just make that bet; you go “all in” — staking your family’s fortunes to those of a family of revolutionary artists. The exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, goes “all in” with Durand-Ruel’s gamble and pays off big with a stirring tale of personal courage and art history in the making.

Most voters value honesty when they head to the polls, but politicians know that being too honest could be counterproductive.

Psychologist Paul Ekman, one of the world’s foremost experts on emotion, suggests that police departments can keep risky officers off the streets with one simple technological assessment.

“If you are receptive and humble,” said Dirac, “mathematics will lead you by the hand.”

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

It was fifty years ago that the French philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre graciously refused the Nobel Prize for Literature. How different (and more noble?) his world was from ours.

When Howard Zinn first published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, he hoped to start a “quiet revolution” in the way people viewed history. By giving voice […]

Needing to sneak into a packed venue for a 1963 concert, the Beatles got in with a little help from their friends: the Birmingham City Police.

Paul Taylor is the executive vice-president of special projects at the Pew Research Center and author of the book The Next America. An expert in demographic, social and generational research, Taylor recently visited Big Think to discuss the millennial generation.

During the 1960s, four of the most famous people on Earth were collectively known as The Beatles. Most people struggle to deal with the post-fame life, but how do you […]

“What should exist? To me, that’s the most exciting question imaginable. What do we need that we don’t have? How can we realize our potential?”- Paul Allen (born on this date in 1953)

Paul Allen talks about the process of tackling humanity’s greatest challenges through the collaboration of great minds.

Renowned psychologist and emotion-guru Paul Ekman describes how introducing conscious awareness to facial expressions can help one override and control their emotions.

Bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe argues that the Singularity envisioned by Ray Kurzweil isn’t quite right.

Bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe argues that the Singularity envisioned by Ray Kurzweil isn’t quite right.