Are Comedians America’s Great Public Intellectuals?

Clowns Have Always Served as the Conscience of the Nation—At Their Peril and Maybe Ours, Too

One of Shakespeare’s conceits is the wisdom of clowns. From Feste in Twelfth Night to the Fool in King Lear, they speak truth to power, but tell it slant and do so at their peril.

The stabbing last month of Salman Rushdie, who lived under threat of a decades-long fatwa for his comedic novel, The Satanic Verses, and Will Smith’s Oscars stage assault on Chris Rock remind us that satire is risky business: One person’s hilarity is another’s sacrilege. Satirists, comics, and fools are ideological pathfinders, risking their reputations, and sometimes …

Genius Alone Doesn’t Advance Big Ideas

World-Changing Thought Depends on the Social Context, Too

Where do big new ideas come from—the kind that break the mold and change how we see the world? As a sociologist, this has long been an interest of mine. …

Mapping Big Thinkers and Their Ideas

Viewing Clusters Over Time Provides Insights into Networks of Influence

To understand where ideas come from and how they evolve over time, sociologist Randall Collins mapped the networks of 3,000 philosophers and mathematicians, a yeoman project that took him on …

You Never Get One Isolated Great Thinker at a Time

Sociologist Randall Collins on Creativity Clusters and the Importance of Good Questions

Randall Collins’ curiosity about where ideas come from led him to do 25 years of research on the networks that connected thinkers and ideas through history and across continents. Collins, …