I enjoy listening to people who think big, so the website Big Think is a regular stop. Their latest project is What Went Wrong. Over the next several weeks, the site will feature interviews with people in the financial industry.
Week one spotlights Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel and his thoughts on bubbles, the Fed, Bernanke and AIG’s bailout. But actually, I was more captured by the comments of Peter Thiel. He’s a co-founder of PayPal and currently president of Clarium Capital. Among his topics: Are Baby Boomers the dumbest generation? Economist John Maynard Keynes is dead to him. And how our country’s being run by people living in the dark ages. Thought-provoking stuff.
And speaking of big ideas, New York Times Magazine has its 9th Annual Year in Ideas
, described here:
Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world.
Among my favorites — The Advertisement that watches you, The Kitchen Sink that puts out house fires and Printable Batteries.
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