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Like most people, I hate paying taxes. I’d love to keep all the money I earn, and receive government services for free. But I nevertheless have argued that if anything […]

The Earth has a long shelf life, but it is, alas, temporary. Before the Sun explodes in 5 billion years, there are a number of extraterrestrial threats to our planet, from rogue black holes to magnetars.

UPDATE: Read the Nature editorial which dubs Climate Shift “essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in the climate debate.” Nature magazine has posted a news story about the […]

N.A.S.A. is turning to private companies to replace the space shuttles, and it will give four proposals from the likes of Boeing and SpaceX $269 million this year to develop space taxis.

In a country referred to as “the worst place to be a child”, for five years now, Abraham “Abramz” Tekya has been using hip hop and breakdance to empower, rehabilitate, […]

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Some of the most enthusiastic about the upcoming Royal Wedding between Kate Middleton and Prince William are American friends of mine. We have already despatched […]

So the most honest and penetrating book I’ve read about American higher education in a long time is HIGHER EDUCATION: HOW COLLEGES ARE WASTING OUR MONEY AND FAILING OUR KIDS–AND […]

The more educated you are the more likely your marriage will be a happy one. 

Sam Biddle says date sites like Match.com should screen out sex offenders. But how far should such screening go? And once a sex offender always a sex offender?

UPDATE: See additional reponse to statements made by Joe Romm. Last night marked the release of the report Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate, part of a […]

The latest installment of the BigThink Global Roundtable on the Future of Economic Competition asks about the future of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency — and what […]

More than half of British adults are so worried about their online reputation they would love to erase all they had ever posted on the Internet about themselves, a new survey shows.

When someone these days is exposed publicly for perpetrating an act of racial bigotry against African Americans, somewhere during their non-apologizing and excuse making, you are almost certain to get […]

Yesterday I had a very pleasant talk with Tim Ridgway of Califone which once more showed how broad the transition period we are currently go through actually is. Califone develops […]

They say that you’re not supposed to apologize for not blogging. Instead, you’re supposed to just start back up again. But I’m usually much more prolific online and have been absent for […]

“What happened to Africa?” an art-world friend of New York Times writer Holland Cotter asked. “It disappeared.” What that friend was alluding to, and what Cotter analyzes in a recent […]

Today, I was planning to write about memory in decision making, but when I came across this new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, I felt like I had […]

Salman Khan’s self-paced learning model reverses the traditional “one size fits all” educational paradigm. Khan’s model assigns video lectures as homework, and “what used to be homework the students now […]

There are three major functions of higher education: knowledge, socialization and accreditation. How can the Web simulate this experience of college?

There’s been a violent backlash on Greece’s streets over the country’s austerity package and $157b bailout. Angry Greeks are pressing for the country to default on its debt.

Finnish voters have ousted a pro-bailout government and hung a question mark over Europe’s plans to rescue Portugal and other debt-ridden economies.

A leaked report says the Sri Lankan government shelled hospitals, fired on civilians in no-fire zones and attacked the U.N. and Red Cross in the last days of civil war two years ago.

The BRICS countries are bypassing Europe as they build what will become the shortest and fastest internet route between the Americas, Africa and India and China.

While the British Navy may have secured military victory for the British Empire, Shakespeare’s words secured the peace.

The dollar is still the dominant reserve currency, but for how long? The IMF has recently forecast that China’s economy will overtake that of the U.S. in 2016. How will […]

This map, distributed in France in the last year of the First World War, uses a trope common to a lot of cartographic propaganda: the enemy as an octopus, a […]

Just so you don’t think I’ve fallen off the face of the Earth … I have been at the 2011 Keck Geology Symposium for Undergraduate Research at Union College for […]

Reflections on Rapture, Ecstasy, and Technology BY JASON SILVA “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.”. – John Archibald Wheeler Sober, immersive reading is […]

Two decades after creating the World Wide Web, in a speech at an MIT symposium, Tim Berners-Lee said that “access to the web is now a human right”. Probably not many […]

The Strange Death of Radical Journalism  And so to another inconvenient truth that should trouble anyone interested in the clash of ideas, real passion in journalism, polemic and a radicalism […]