This is a digital age, one in which a wealth of accessible information empowers you, the citizen-consumer. But where is the information coming from? How accurate and unprocessed is it, really? Ask yourself this: how empowered do you feel debating a television screen or a newspaper?

Our task is to move the discussion away from talking heads and talking points, and give it back to you. That is Big Think's mission. In practice, this means that our information is truly interactive. When you log onto our site, you can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with todays leading thinkers, movers and shakers. You can search them by question or by topic, and, best of all, respond in kind. Upload a video in which you take on Senator Ted Kennedy's views on immigration; post a slideshow of your trip to China that supports David Dollar's assertion that pollution in China is a major threat; or answer with plain old fashioned text. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or heck, throw your own question or idea into the ring.

Big Think is yours. We are what you think.

Big Think - We Are What You Think

Mohsin Hamid, looking back on the process of writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

The time had come for me to decide what to do with my life, and where to do it. The choices I faced were confusing.

By the summer of 2001 I had produced a draft ... a stripped-down, utterly minimalist love story of a young Pakistani man in New York who is troubled by the notion that he is a modern-day janissary serving the empire of American corporatism.

People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.

My Reluctant Fundamentalist

On this New Year's Day, spare a thought for the hapless nerd. Clad in too-short, too-tight pants, armed with a pocket protector, glasses firmly taped together and pimples unpopped, the nerds of this nation most likely rang in the New Year with a rousing game of World of Warcraft. They probably didn't even hear the ball drop at midnight.

That is, if there really is such a thing as a nerd.

Contrast this with:

What is a nerd?

Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at UCSB, has concluded that nerdiness is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

See also:

The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Ridicule That's Getting On Our Nerds

Jared Diamond:

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

Each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.

Remember:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

What’s Your Consumption Factor?

The easiest way to get Dugg is to have a trivial idea.

Once having committed stupidity, it seemed preferable to remain consistently stupid until the bitter end. I would stick to my guns, even if they were pointed at my own head.

Waiting to do something until you can be sure of doing it exactly right means waiting for ever.

The settlers are calling their compound "House of Peace," but are also considering "Martyrs’ Peak."

Pakistan is the most urbanized country in South Asia.

"Look, this is a democracy," said one woman there who refused to be identified.

And so what kind of country do I want to live in? I want to live in the kind of country where a woman doesn't get slapped for wearing a "Kitty Not Happy" T-shirt.

Most of the essays in "Monkeyluv" are engaging. This one is a masterpiece.

Taking for granted the misery of the human condition, goth turns depression into an aesthetic, a semi-ironic pose — a perfect style for the awkward and self-conscious.

Something about our fast-paced, super consumerist society seems to have robbed the teaching vocation of the respect it deserves.

I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that "critical thinking" is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority.

Public-school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents, "accessing" K-8 education in unforeseen ways. Big media and big politics are all flying through an electronic meteor shower just now, and not all will survive.

Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities.

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people’s liv... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Few Westerners will find it convenient to break the eight-solid-hours mold, but that tells you more about the kind of society we are than what our bodies and minds might really need.

Perchance to Dream

The Brits thought Americans prudes. But then the table turned.

Quick, Jeeves, Cover the Piano Legs!

ONE of the great ironies of living in a consumerist culture is that, in pursuit of success, so many of us unwittingly surrender our freedom. We confuse career and consumer choices with personal liberty, when in fact they all represent the same underlying decision: to buy into the system that produced them.

Escape from Consumerville

Waiting, scrimping, taking stock: This is the vernacular of the moment for a nation reckoning with the leftovers of a real estate boom gone sour. From the dense suburbs of northern Virginia to communities arrayed across former farmland in California, these are the days of pullback: with real estate values falling, local governments are cutting services, eliminating staff and shelving projects.

Families seemingly disconnected from real estate bust are finding themselves sucked into its orbit, as neighbors lose their homes and the economy absorbs the strains of so much paper wealth wiped out so swiftly.

This Is the Sound of a Bubble Bursting

I was 8 when my family moved to Bethlehem in 1949. We were Muslim refugees from the newly created Israel. Back then, nearly all the townspeople were Christian. I went to a Christian school and sang in a church choir. I loved to go to Sunday service and shut my eyes, listening to the cadences of Latin Mass--which I didn't understand--and breathing in the fragrance of incense.

Back then, "Christian" and "Muslim" were labels we kept in our pockets. It didn't matter what religion you belonged to. It was common for us Muslims to attend Sunday Mass, since we honor Jesus and Mary, or, as we call them in Arabic, Issa and Miriam.

Postcard: Bethlehem