Our BIG THINKING friend Robert de Neufville is right to notice public opinion trending in favor of same-sex marriage. And so it seems reasonable for him to predict that it […]
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With SETI’s search for extraterrestrial life running on all cylinders again, two questions must be raised: How do we make contact? And how do we make meaningful contact? Big Think asked Bill Nye, aka, ‘The Science Guy,’ who heads The Planetary Society.
As was so aptly said just a few days ago: It is hard to make an argument that there are many desirable post-secondary educational or career scenarios for current high […]
I’m not a big science fiction reader, but I admire how the genre has just enough of a toehold in reality that it feels plausibly weird. It stakes out the […]
The internet went crazy Sunday night after Black In America: The New Promised Land- Silicon Valley. Twitter, the place on the internet where the wired segment of Afro America goes […]
The Consumer Electronics Show is over and Mat Honan, senior reporter for Gizmodo.com, is depressed. He wrote a lyrical piece about the melancholia created by a three-day Bacchanalia of […]
I’d be remiss if I let 2011 slip by without a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), who was born a century ago and who now looms larger over contemporary poetry […]
–Guest post by Meng Shi, American University graduate student with contributions from Matthew Nisbet. Framing is a frequently used term that derives from several decades of research in the social […]
Today Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Swedish winner since 1974 and the first umlauted winner since Herta Müller in 2009. The citation mentions […]
It’s been over a month since the last MVP, so I thought it might be time to throw out another. Last time, Chris Reykjavik got the right answer – Kaula […]
So this post is, first of all, a piece of shameless self-promotion. I’m the editor of the best journal in political philosophy and the related fields—Perspectives on Political Science. The most […]
The key to managing change in the modern world is not having all of the answers, but rather being able to ask the right questions.
As regular readers know, I’ve devoted considerable time to writing about the child-molestation scandal engulfing the Catholic church. The core of this story isn’t that there are child abusers within […]
How many times will Bob Dylan be accused of plagiarism of one kind or another? The latest accusations blowing in the wind involve not Dylan’s style or songs, but rather […]
Today, north of the border, in one of my favorite Canadian cities, there is a book launch for Michelle Shephard’s new book, Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone. […]
Was the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki legal? Was it wise and did it make Americans safer?
I enjoyed this recent article by Neal Stephenson in the World Policy Journal, but I think he and his editors may have buried their lede. Stephenson, a bestselling science fiction […]
Unfortunately, Facebook’s rules against certain kinds of material, specifically nudes, threaten to censor artists who depict the human body
Yesterday was Constitution Day. Let’s face it. It’s a commemoration that hasn’t caught on. A few years ago Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia snuck through some legislation requiring that every […]
It’s just willful silliness to argue that questions about how much of “our money” the government can take is logically incoherent.
The September issue of the American Journal of Public Health is now available online featuring 8 studies and articles by an interdisciplinary set of experts, each examining the health risks […]
This semester I am teaching a doctoral seminar on the important questions and trends related to media, technology and democracy. In this post, I introduce several major topics and provide […]
The I.M.F. will need strong leadership as it continues to help euro-area countries deal with massive debt problems. Some think it is time the institution picked a non-European boss.
Elm Point and Buffalo Bay Point are quite possibly America’s most obscure exclaves in Canada.
Disputes about evidence in social science can drag on for decades. I bet many a researcher has fantasized about the day when a world-famous panel of judges looks at the […]
The NASA Earth Observatory has been doing an excellent job of monitoring the eruption at Eritrea’s Nabro using all their eyes in the sky. The latest image, taken from the […]
So, what is the difference between tantric sex and regular sex? The goal of tantric sex is for the man to postpone orgasm as long as possible whereas in regular […]
–Guest post by Patrick Riley, AoE Culture Correspondent If you accept the notion that no one knows what to eat these days since they’re bombarded with conflicting nutritional advice at every […]
Early this morning, a number of prisoners escaped from a Yemeni central prison in the eastern coastal city of al-Mukalla. The details, as with most stories – particularly breaking ones […]
Liposuction is often billed as a permanent surgical solution to unwanted fat deposits. Various types of fat-sucking surgery have been available for over three decades, but these procedures have rarely […]