All posts tagged: Reflections

Reflections on the ‘Brave New World’ of Farming

Reflections on the ‘Brave New World’ of Farming

Published by Jenni Sidey

Farmers across the West are socioeconomically not in a good place right now. Many are leaving the profession, which used to be a vocation, due to big payoffs by the EU and other such wealthy bloated Net-Zero globalists encouraging them to sell the land. There is also the allure of AI and Hi-Tech machinery, which I’ll come to later. I used to work as an agricultural correspondent and editor of a farming magazine some 20 years ago and things were financially bad back then for farmers throughout the West but things are now a lot worse. The war on farming in the past was less obvious, but it goes back a long time to late-1950s/early ’60s, when new expensive machinery led to bigger intense farming and less farm employees, amongst other labour-led factors. With AI technologies, some farms are already hosting robotic ‘workers’ toiling away on the land, from dusk to dawn. These tend to the livestock’s needs, but there are also plans to have them watch over crops, while other agri-robots hoe weeds and …

In Her Final Reflections, Jane Goodall Issues a Warning: “Without Hope, We Fall Into Apathy”

In Her Final Reflections, Jane Goodall Issues a Warning: “Without Hope, We Fall Into Apathy”

Published by José Betancourt

For many of us, Jane Goodall was one of those cul­tur­al fig­ures who seemed always to have been around, and on some lev­el, made us feel like she always would be. But of course, no human being lives for­ev­er, no mat­ter how wide­ly admired. Goodall made her own depar­ture last fall, in the mid­dle of an Amer­i­can speak­ing tour, at the age of 91. Just two days there­after, she appeared as the guest on the pre­miere of Net­flix’s Famous Last Words, a pro­gram con­sist­ing of inter­views con­duct­ed express­ly to air only after the inter­vie­wee’s death. In the clip above, the show’s host, TV writer-direc­tor-pro­duc­er Brad Falchuk, asks her an out­ward­ly sim­ple ques­tion: “Who would you say you were?” Goodall describes her­self as “some­body sent to this world to try to give peo­ple hope in dark times, because with­out hope, we fall into apa­thy and do noth­ing, and in the dark times that we are liv­ing in now, if peo­ple don’t have hope, we’re doomed. How can we bring lit­tle chil­dren into this dark world we’ve …

Light and Thread by Han Kang review – a tantalising book of reflections | Han Kang

Light and Thread by Han Kang review – a tantalising book of reflections | Han Kang

Published by Sam Flores

When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. In other words, Han’s work looks both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts –  and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle. Much of the appeal of Han’s work is in its mystery, the gaps she leaves for the reader to close. So it is tantalising to have this collection of prose, “a book of reflections” that might illuminate the darker corners of her work. It is a hope partly fulfilled. Light and Thread – the title from a poem Han wrote at the age of eight – comes in three parts, which we might categorise as writing, poetry and gardening. The title essay, her Nobel laureate lecture, does open up the novels a little. The Vegetarian, about a woman whose progressive rejection of social norms results in her trying to become a plant, was, we learn, …

Winter Olympics reflections from NPR reporters : NPR

Winter Olympics reflections from NPR reporters : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

The Olympic cauldron at the Arco della Pace in Milan on Sunday. Maja Hitij/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Maja Hitij/Getty Images A global event can feel like a small world These were famously spread-out Olympics, but to me — who mostly stayed in one city covering one sport — they felt almost immediately like a small world. Soon enough, I had my go-to food spots and preferred transit shortcuts, friendly bits with venue security guards and a hilariously high number of Snoop Dogg near-misses (I finally saw him sitting rinkside with Martha Stewart and Ilia Malinin, worth the wait). Best of all, I got to know many of the other reporters covering figure skating. We spent long, late nights in the trenches: watching the extreme highs and lows of competition, alternately discussing and distracting ourselves as we waited downstairs to talk to athletes. We shared quotes, saved seats and — once — sprinted up multiple flights of stairs just in time for the next skater to take the ice. And it wasn’t just at …

Why Reflections on Teaching Philosophy Matter: A Call for Contributions

Why Reflections on Teaching Philosophy Matter: A Call for Contributions

Published by Jenni Sidey

Philosophy, by Gustav Klimt, 1907. Public domain. When Gustav Klimt unveiled Philosophy at the Vienna Secession in 1900, the painting didn’t attempt to explain philosophy so much as to evoke the experience of engaging with it. A vertical procession of figures moves through shifting light, while a symbolic head occupies its own reflective register. The work gestures less toward tidy resolution than toward the generative processes that precede it: exploration, interpretation, and the gradual formation of thought. Much of philosophy occupies that interval, and the teaching of philosophy perhaps even more so, as students experiment with ideas and frameworks before coherence fully settles. I’m joining the Professor Reflection Series as a new editor, and I’m looking forward to helping continue the work started by Andrew P. Mills and Samuel Taylor. One thing I’ve appreciated about the series is its insistence that teaching is not merely the delivery of information but also a practice that raises its own questions and problems. The strongest contributions have shown how small decisions—an assignment structure, a discussion format, the way …

Blue: Reflections review – a clunky rehash of their Y2K boyband heyday | Blue

Blue: Reflections review – a clunky rehash of their Y2K boyband heyday | Blue

Published by Sam Flores

‘Blue’s in the house / Oh it’s party time!” muse the fortysomething man-band on Souls of the Underground, the penultimate song on this seventh album, and the fourth since their 2011 reunion. The British four-piece are keen to take us back to their early 00s heyday, a time of Met bar table service, where the ladies have “a little prosecco” and the guys have a “nice cold beer”. Musically, it’s a clunkier approximation of their (comparatively) harder-edged hybrid of pop, hip-hop and R&B; think 2002 “low ride” anthem Fly By II but on a Megabus budget. The artwork for Reflections It makes sense that they would want to tap into modern pop’s deep well of nostalgia, but rather than recalling what made Blue originally stand out, Reflections often feels like a tribute to other evergreen boybands. For most of the album’s 13 tracks, the tempo is mid, with the dreary, Westlife-on-a-bad-day Candlelight Fades a particular nadir. The windswept One Last Time and The Day the Earth Stood Still are attacked with gusto, but both feel …

Scaling leadership, inside and out: Reflections from 2025

Scaling leadership, inside and out: Reflections from 2025

Published by Jenni Sidey

As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to practice leadership while helping others develop it. I’m Charlotte Sharpe, Managing Director of Research and Innovation at Big Think+. My role is to drive alignment between our content and platform, ensuring that what we build, design, and deliver truly serves our clients—organizations that are bringing leadership development to life within their own cultures. Across this year, our team’s work has revolved around three ideas: clarity, collaboration, and storytelling. Together, they’ve shaped how we scale leadership: both inside Big Think+ and across the organizations we partner with.  1. Clarity Scales One of our most important realizations this year is that clarity is a form of leadership. The ability to define what we mean, decide what matters, and move forward even when information is incomplete has been essential to every major milestone we reached. In her Big Think+ lesson “Systematic Strategies for Making Hard Calls,” Suzy Welch reminds us that decisiveness is not about being impulsive. It’s about using structure to make confident …

Thoughtful Reflections by Dr. Sanjay Runwal

Thoughtful Reflections by Dr. Sanjay Runwal

Published by Jenni Sidey

In an age saturated with self-help literature promising quick fixes and transformative breakthroughs, Dr. Sanjay Runwal’s “Thoughtful Reflections: For a Meaningful Life” stands apart as a refreshingly honest and grounded guide to everyday living. This collection of 401 reflections, born from a disciplined year-long practice of daily contemplation, offers readers something increasingly rare in modern personal development literature: practical wisdom rooted in lived experience rather than theoretical idealism. The book emerges from Dr. Runwal’s commitment to what he calls “Mission – Daily Thought Diary,” a practice inspired by His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s similar undertaking. However, where many spiritual texts can feel distant or abstract, Runwal’s reflections remain firmly anchored in the realities of contemporary life. This is not a guru speaking from a mountaintop but a fellow traveler sharing hard-won insights from navigating the same challenges that confront most readers: strained relationships, professional pressures, emotional turbulence, and the universal quest for meaning and purpose. The Architecture of Wisdom What distinguishes this collection is its thoughtful structure and accessibility. Each reflection is carefully crafted with …