Brain Strain

Image: Sameer Pawar

At Forbes India, aside from the regular flurry of work email, we also have an off-work email group through which we share good reading, provocative ideas and other interesting Web links. Recently, one of the senior editors scored a big hit by introducing us to a site called Big Think. The site has a simple, elegant promise: “We put you in contact with the ideas of very smart people.” That alone would have been enough for us, giving us hours of legit (the brass recommended it after all) procrastination. But there’s more, and the reason why we’re recommending that you check it out too.

Big Think has declared August The Month of Thinking Dangerously (bigthink.com/blogs/dangerous-ideas ). By which they mean that they will introduce readers to ideas that “may at first seem shocking or counter-intuitive—but they are worth our attention, even if we end up rejecting them.” A new one will be published each day of the month, and will  include contributions from top experts. Among them, names like Stephen Hawking, Gary Becker and Noam Chomsky. As this page goes to press, we’ve read the case for (and against): Drugging our drinking water; being able to sell our kidneys; erasing painful memories; blotting out the sun; abandoning the earth; and not aiming to get every kid through college. And that’s just the first week.

You know where to find us, editor sahib!