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Big ideas in the news from around the web
Novelist Christopher Rice writes that poorly rendered female characters proliferate in crime novels because their authors are lazy. He outlines four clichés that come up again and again. "When a writer wants to write a thriller from a woman's point of view, he needs to do more than slot [a ...
How can we make sure that the technology behind digital medical records actually does all the things that advocates believe is possible? "Perhaps the most important strategy has to do not with how digital records are implemented, but with how they're designed in the first place," writes Jacob ...
The commercial future of solar energy may have gotten a big boost. Researchers led by Professor Benoit Marsan at the University of Quebec at Montreal have solved two major problems that had been hampering the efficiency and affordability of creating solar cells. Marsan has patented an ...
In Eastern Europe, "the open discussion of a tragedy represents a revolutionary change," writes Anne Applebaum, referring to the Russian response to the tragic plane crash that killed many members of the Polish Government over the weekend. "Over the past 20 years, both Russian and Polish officials ...
"Americans need to have a rational debate about options for ensuring the solvency of Social Security and Medicare," writes Michael Lind, and they "also need to have a rational debate about the desirable levels and skill composition of immigration. But the two debates should be kept separate." He ...
New protostars that will eventually be 10 times as large as the sun have been discovered in the massive Rosette molecular cloud, 5,000 light years away. Scientists are studying the formation of such stars because they feed light and energy into the space dust around them and can trigger the ...
Samuel Culbert writes that it's time for companies to do away with performance reviews. "Everybody does it, and almost everyone who's evaluated hates it. It's a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus." It's not that ...
Liberals want President Obama to find a progressive nominee for the Supreme Court who is "an intellectual giant, and also passionate, persuasive, and politically savvy enough to build consensus and outfox the court's conservatives" -- someone not unlike Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who retired ...
"Is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?" asks Paul Krugman in a long magazine article looking at the economic costs and benefits associated with fighting climate change. Yes, he concludes. And while the U.S. isn't likely to take action soon ...
Parents have long disagreed over whether children benefit from being spanked when they do something wrong. The American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't think the practice is an effective tactic, but many parents have found otherwise. New research, however, shows that children who are spanked are more ...
The governing body of the Catholic Church, The Holy See, is often treated as a sovereign nation, giving it outsize political influence among the world's religions, write Kal Raustiala and Lara Stemple. This practice has long been bad for women's equality, gay rights, and reproductive freedom, they ...
Republicans have been giddy about their prospects in the midterm elections, but Democrats could be saved if the economy recovers over the summer, writes James Surowiecki. Voters have short memories. "But economies aren’t machines. The Democrats will have to spend the next seven months much the way ...
After 50 years of searching for intelligent life in outer space, astronomers still haven't made contact with extraterrestrials. "Does that mean we are alone in the universe after all? Or might we be looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time?" asks Paul Davies. He notes that ...
The infamous English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge "was also a metacognitive theorist far ahead of his time," writes David Schneider. "Specifically, from around 1796 to about 1808, Coleridge was incessantly burying into four related questions: how does perception work; how does the mind ...
Research has found that over time stress can be very harmful to the brain, draining it of a certain protein involved with helping neurons in the hippocampus -- affecting memory, mood, and cognition. "The findings suggest that BDNF is one of the proteins that play a role in mediating the brain's ...