I don’t write fiction, at all. I can’t make stuff up. But I used to read more fiction than I do now. And occasionally I wonder why I’ve struggled to […]
Search Results
You searched for: genius
According to The Independent, a recent Yale-Moscow State University study has found “a modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability element to creative writing.” The conclusion was based on an evaluation […]
Google’s new glasses, which work like a hands-free smartphone, will continue to erase technological barriers to entering modern culture. Our storytelling ability stands to benefit greatly.
What hasn’t been said about Louis C.K.? The New York Times called him a “comedic Quentin Tarantino.” Writing for the Los Angeles Book Review Adam Wilson said he was “television’s […]
Google’s effort to map every street in the world has given the company troves of data it can use to create self-driving cars. Today, innovation means extracting data in novel ways.
We want to ascribe intentionality and blame for success and failure, then study them for blueprints. But Gladwell says he’s always found it more productive to follow his own curiosity without worrying too much about whether or not the world will reward him for it.
Let’s face a sad truth: To be a book lover in the 21st century is a hard task. In the world of the knowledge economy and of constantly being plugged […]
It’s obvious why we are motivated to eat, drink and reproduce; the origins of our desire to push musical boundaries, on the other hand, are less clear.
NASA engineer Adam Steltzner is driving his team to attempt the seemingly impossible.
Shakespeare was a ruthless thief. Some of his first plays – the three parts of Henry VI – were so similar to Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great thatmany eighteenth-century scholars […]
While flipping through Modern Furniture: 150 Years of Design, I couldn’t help but stop and smile at seeing the same monobloc chair sitting on my backyard deck sitting there on […]
In slang, the “cheating band” used to mean that conspicuous band of paler skin revealed when a would-be cheater took off their wedding band to fool and seduce a new […]
There are just 30 people worldwide whose brain injuries have rewired their brains in ways that allow them to perform amazing feats. But now a machine replicates the process with some success.
As the details of the undercover operation to infiltrate AQAP continue to be made public the picture of what happened is starting clear. As I wrote yesterday, it appears that […]
The challenge for democracies is to become just as farsighted as the state capitalist systems that have drawn the world’s envy. But while we try to bring about this small revolution in our thinking, the state capitalists may be dealing with a much bigger revolution of their own.
I was going to flip a coin to decide whether or not to write about the Supreme Court RATS – an acronym a progressive blogger from Daily Kos invented for […]
As we find more planets outside our solar system and more terrestrial life that survives brutal conditions, scientists are wondering what a completely new form of life might be like.
This article was originally published on AlterNet. What kind of world would we have if a majority of the human race was atheist? To hear religious apologists tell it, the […]
Jad Abumrad loves collecting sounds and playing with high-tech gadgetry, but he deploys his geekery in service of a higher calling – creating in Radiolab a hybrid medium that is a natural evolution of the ancient art of storytelling.
There are so many great articles in the July/August issue of The Atlantic that I could pretty much blog on it alone for the rest of year. But the most […]
Singapore is the smartphone king of the world. With a staggering 62 per cent penetration rate for smartphones of all kinds (well in reality mostly Apple ones), it stands to […]
Several years ago, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister conducted a study that measured the productivity of computer programmers. Their data set included more than 600 programmers from 92 companies. According […]
Here’s a distinguished political scientist—Jacqueline Stevens—who agrees with me that the NSF ought to cut the funding for political science. The Republicans in Congress think that these “scientists” are covertly […]
The future is mysterious, but not entirely. It is tangible in the promises that a person makes and in the unspoken responsibility one has to others. However much a person […]
Call it art, experimental philosophy, theater, or what you will – Jonathan Keats plays the fool as a kind of public protest against the ever-present danger of taking ourselves and our understanding of the world too seriously.
Most “honest” people are willing to cheat by “fudging” their results in order to give themselves small gains.
A collection of the world’s top engineers and tech entrepreneurs will be invited to a hush-hush conference somewhere in the Pacific this May. Eccentric venture capitalists are behind the idea.
Richard Marshall of 3:AM interviews the philosopher Eddie Nahmias about his work on free will. Everyone who would prefer not to be trapped in a thicket of confusion about free […]
What’s the Big Idea? “Contemporary research on consciousness in neuroscience rests on unquestioned but highly questionable foundations. Human nature is no less mysterious now than it was a hundred years […]
New scientific manuscripts, political thoughts and love letters written by Einstein have been made public by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which the physicist helped to found.