Search Results

Just as religion informed the dawn of civilized man, so too do these 21st century stories act as a shield – protecting our sanity from an overwhelming sensation of entropic change. We are trying to find the signal in the noise. But increasingly, the noise is becoming louder and louder. It’s like this treadmill we’re running on has reached a speed we can’t keep up with. Today’s prowess Kairos is being pushed into yesterday’s fleeting Chronos. It’s a collision of dizzying proportions… everything happens now.

Recently General Motors announced that they’re building a new, $258 million enterprise data center in Moring, Michigan. With it, they are going from 23 outsourced data centers around the world […]

Antiquated phrasings don’t make you any more profound than antiquated notions.

I wrote a short post on Thursday suggesting that whether you’re a fan or a sworn enemy of the surveillance state, you’d be wrong to condemn the pending prosecution of […]

There is a moral case for intervening in Syria.

The brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses – perhaps the hottest technological trend ever in the field of higher education – is disrupting more than just the conventional […]

It’s quite a refined art to be able to assess the quality of the information wherever it’s acquired. 

      I just read an alarming piece on what the world will look like, possibly soon, when the efficacy of our current arsenal of antibiotics really starts to fade. There […]

What scares me most is how we start to think the way the technology wants us to think.

Money is a very powerful symbol and it influences us in a number of different ways.

Today’s Medicaid could affect a small number of poor people within two years. Truly finding out how Medicaid might change their lives would take much longer. Moreover, Medicaid would change with time, too – and almost certainly for the better.

A couple of years ago Dr Mirjam Tuk won an IgNobel prize for the paper “Inhibitory Spill-Over: Increased Urinating Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains” in Psychological Science. Tuk […]

It’s the most popular—and least reality-based—sentiment of the disgruntled white college applicant with high scores: a black kid took my seat.

Throughout my career I’ve been surprised. Perhaps the most amazing surprise to me was actually one that I ultimately proposed but it defied everything I’d thought before. And that is […]

Last night Ben Goldacre appeared on BBC Newsnight (viewable from UK ip addesses or portals only, for the next 7 days) discussing the ongoing havoc caused by the MMR scare in […]

Welcome to the brave new world of cyber warfare.

Researchers at HP Labs have created a new kind of three-dimensional display that projects hologram-like videos without the need of external hardware such as special glasses.

Should things be banned because they destroy many lives? An initial response might be YES. But consider what we’re actually replying to by saying “YES”. We’re not saying we want […]

Now that Russian scientists claim to have retrieved a vial of blood from a thawing wooly mammoth carcass from the permafrost of Siberia, the scientific community has been buzzing with speculation […]

There were three great scientific horse races in the last century. The first two, the race to the moon and the race to split the atom have been widely reported. […]

In a charming essay on envy, A.S. Byatt observes that it “works inwardly; concealment is part of its nature.” Envy is a festering kind of sin. It’s also the Deadly […]

The $250,000 seven-meter truck was unveiled in Cape Town last week, and is designed to reach the 6 in 10 sub-Saharan Africans who live in rural areas without easy access to medical treatment.

What’s the most perfect, ideal, pure act of sexual consent that you can imagine? Maybe it would be you and your most favorite lover, ever, in a hotel room for […]

Today we explore books on biology, recommended by our experts, editors and readers.

Is the pursuit of happiness, which we Americans will celebrate later this week, a worthy goal? Many have said no, on the grounds that happiness comes only to those who […]

LITTLE IS known about China in Europe and America. Although the Chinese were enviable thinkers for over three millennia, almost nothing of their originality has reached us intact. The reason […]

We always have to remember that in macroeconomic statistics we care about things like growth and unemployment because ultimately they affect peoples’ lives.  

In a paper released today by Harvard University, I analyze the career of writer-turned-activist Bill McKibben and his impact over the past 20 years on the  climate change debate.  Below is […]

So what young conservative blogger/essayist would you recommend to challenge those who believe they’re smarter than every conservative in the world?  Well, SAM GOLDMAN. Sam’s not the only one by […]

So here’s a funny article on the sheer silliness and passive-aggressive hostility of the jargon that dominates the worlds of management, consultants, marketing, and all that.  That world, it seems to me, […]