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One of the 20th century's most famous, influential, and successful physicists is lauded the world over. But Feynman is no hero to me.
Some biologists believe natural selection produces animals that are just good enough. Dawkins disagrees.
Scientists are befuddled by where the shark gets most of its food.
A study finds a link between intolerant attitudes among some Americans and support for anti-democratic measures and army rule.
Sudan leaves behind only two other northern white rhinos, but artificial reproductive technologies could provide a future for the subspecies.
Artists such as Glenn Ligon still look to comedian Richard Pryor to make sense of the African-American experience.
More than 20 years ago, the sitcom Seinfeld went “meta” and joked that it was “a show about nothing.” But 20 years before George Costanza’s epiphany, artist Richard Tuttle was staging shows about nothing featuring works such as Wire Piece (detail shown above) — a piece of florist wire nailed at either end to a wall marked with a penciled line. But, as Jerry concludes, there’s “something” in that “nothing.” A new retrospective of Tuttle’s art at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Both/And: Richard Tuttle Print and Cloth, dives into the depths, and widths, of this difficultly philosophical, yet compellingly simple artist who takes the everyday nothings of line, paper, and cloth to create extraordinary statements about the need to be mindful of the artful world all around us.
"The extasy [sic] of abstract beauty," artist Richard Pousette-Dart scrawled in 1981 in a notebook on a page across from a Georges Braque-looking abstract pencil drawing. Although included in Nina Leen’s iconic 1951 Life magazine photo "The Irascibles" that featured Abstract Expressionist heavyweights Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, Pousette-Dart has always stood on the edges, as he does in the photo, of full identification with that group.
Michael Jackson proudly wore the crown as the “King of Pop” until his death in 2009. In the visual arts, at least for Americans, Andy Warhol’s ruled as the “King […]
So, here’s the question for today: How should we respond when people we admire make serious missteps? Just so there’s no confusion, I want to say right up front that […]
Every May brings with it a new crop of college graduation speeches. This spring, few (maybe none) were as though-provoking as multimedia artist Laurie Anderson’s at the School of Visual […]
This summer at The Phillips Collection there’s a different kind of colorblindness going on. White is the “new black,” or at least the color telling the most interesting stories in […]
5mins
“Let me go and I’ll tell you who shot that white kid.”
The questions about which massive structures to build, and where, are actually very hard to answer. Infrastructure is always about the future: It takes years to construct, and lasts for years beyond that.
"For many people, the idea that consciousness is a set of tricks is offensive," the late philosopher told Big Think in 2012. "I think that's a prime mistake."
Before becoming America’s most infamous assassin, John Wilkes Booth was a magnetic actor who was beloved by audiences and courted by critics.
Is the Universe's expansion rate 67 km/s/Mpc, 73 km/s/Mpc, or somewhere in between? The Hubble tension is real and not so easy to resolve.
As US science faces record cuts to funding, jobs, and facilities, these 10 quotes help remind us how science brings value to us all.
Dreams of resurrecting lost species didn’t start in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.
As democracy recedes and fascism rises in the USA and around the world in 2025, history provides a lesson in how science can fight fascism.
As we shape our future we should ask: Which interpretations of classic sci-fi fables hold sway with today’s powerful tech leaders?
Science writer Matt Ridley joins us to discuss how “Darwin’s strangest idea” makes us all a bit feather-brained (in a good way).
It’s been 65 years since Richard Feynman saw “plenty of room” in the nano-world. Are we finally getting down there?
Gravitational waves are the last signatures that are emitted by merging black holes. What happens when these two phenomena meet in space?
"We are not our grandparents. It’s time to start thinking differently," journalist Annie Jacobsen told Big Think.
What would it take to create a truly intelligent microbot, one that can operate independently?
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has been a controversial diagnosis since it was first described, back in the 1940s.
Big Think spoke with historian Marc-William Palen about the egalitarian aims of the free-trade movement in past centuries.
The pseudoscience phrenology swept the popular imagination, and its practitioners made a mint preying on prejudices, gullibility, and misinformation.
Various environmental phenomena can play tricks on our brain.