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“Dune: Part One” screenwriter Eric Roth spoke with Big Think about the challenges of bringing Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic to the big screen.
When done right, dark humor can help us face inconvenient truths and question stifling social conventions.
“Block. It puts some writers down for months. It puts some writers down for life.”
Many were expecting extremism survivor and free speech advocate Salman Rushdie to take home the Nobel Prize in Literature, but Annie Ernaux beat him to it.
Socrates lived during a time when people did not strive to separate fact from fiction. So how much of what we know about Socrates is true?
Take your story from beginning to end with expert guidance.
There's a lot to love about the innovations of Scrivener 3 for the Mac.
An algorithm produced every possible melody. Now its creators want to destroy songwriter copyrights.
A computer coder and a lawyer decide they have a right to speak for all the songwriters that ever lived, those who are alive today, and all those yet to be born.
Following the Booker shortlisting of her novel 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World, British-Turkish author and activist Elif Shafak returns to Think Again to talk about forgotten lives, the nature of evil, and what we mean by progress.
Etgar Keret's stories are as funny, painful, and surreal as life itself. We talk about the craziness of his native Israel, his new collection of short stories FLY ALREADY, marijuana, dementia, and much more.
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison
The wonder and the ethics of deep time. The "wood-wide-web". The claustrophobia of the Anthropocene. In our 200th episode, UNDERLAND author Robert MacFarlane takes us on a journey deep into the Earth and ourselves.
Throughout his career, the famous philosopher has been trying to correct people's misconceptions about anarchy. Here's some of his thinking.
As this typewritten map shows, constraints can be freeing.
The 71-year-old author suggests replacing the adjective "amazing" with something more "pungent & specific".
Maria Konnikova, best-selling author and former Big Think columnist, will be speaking with poker legend Erik Seidel and Big Think president Peter Hopkins at a New York City event on August 1.
We all love the art, but we often forget the difficulty of being an artist. Here are some of the most famous, greatest writers of all time who never could quite make a living doing it.
When novelists and poets reveal their writing process we learn a great deal about our own development.
John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, and Maya Angelou all had different approaches to writing. Here's some of their best advice.
It takes a certain ability to shut off the outside world if you want to write more than a few sentences. John Irving sums it up in just over 1 minute.
One writer’s journey through a video game that can only be completed by writing.
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When you are experiencing writer's block, more than your writing is blocked, says memoirist and novelist Augusten Burroughs. Here is his creative solution to get you writing again.
A new book offers insights into the makers of earworms you can't escape.
What do British Romantic Era poets and video games have in common? The answer is Elegy for a Dead World, an unlikely game that leaves the players with “no game […]
Writers without a muse are like runners without legs. Luckily, technology is here to help.
More science, more stories, and more spectacular scientists are coming to Starts With A Bang! Image credit: BBC, The Story of Science. “Men at some time are masters of their […]
In 1875 George Routledge, founder of the British publishing house that bore his name, asked Scottish author Samuel Smiles when he would have the honor of publishing one of his […]
Do you remember what it was like to use a rotary phone? Or flipping through less than a dozen available television channels? That AOL CD-ROM? The list of extinct, or […]
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Ken Auletta on how the future of television will be free of commercial interruptions, which benefits writers and viewers alike.
I have found people that have overcome adversity and overcome the setbacks quickly are the ones that succeed in the long term.