One salient feature of the United States in the 21st century is a belief that our school system – from pre-kindergarten to higher education – is failing us. There are […]
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What strategy should the atheist movement adopt during the holiday season? Should we focus on doing good works as a visible proof that we’re caring and moral people, or should […]
A FinderCodes kit contains “smart tags” that, when scanned, put the finder in touch with the owner.
Bob Costas’ Sunday Night “perspective,” his celebrated half-time denouncement of American gun culture, wasn’t just dissonant hectoring. It wasn’t just a burlesque of Murrow or Cosell (USA Today‘s forced, but […]
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
The New York Times reports that an MIT statistics professor has found that flying on a commercial jet has never been safer. Not that it was ever that much […]
As lawyers say, exceptional cases make bad law. The director of the CIA having an affair in which, at best, he lacked the wherewithal to keep the secret secret (isn’t […]
Individuals’ personalities – yours and mine included – are not as stable as we think they are.
Last week, four third-party U.S. presidential candidates had a debate in Chicago. As is usual in American politics, third-party debates tend to be all over the map: a mixture of […]
The football helmet was designed to protect players against harm (by skull fractures), but the new behavior created a new threat (of concussions and other brain injuries).
So I’ve gotten several emails asking what I think about the idea talked up by the devoted Democratic professor Jonathan Zimmerman in the semi-iconoclastic Christian Science Monitor: affirmative action for conservatives […]
You may have missed it, but on the Friday heading into the Christmas holiday, the FDA announced its decision about the safety of salmon genetically engineered to grow faster. After […]
Fellow pseudonymous neuroblogger Neuroskeptic(to whom I owe a great deal in inspiration) has published a fantastic piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ($) on the benefits to science of anonymity. Last November Neuroskeptic became […]
If phantom islands can be discovered as recently as 2012, maybe there are still more of them out there.
A new math curriculum is needed to move us from the knowledge economy to “the computational knowledge economy where high-level math is integral to what everyone does.”
In a new study at the journal BMC Medical Ethics, my colleague Declan Fahy and I analyze the journalistic and critical reception of Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 best-selling book The Immortal Life of […]
Last year, when I wrote about the death of Savita Halappanavar from anti-choice theology, I pointed out that several Catholic bloggers seemed to think Catholic doctrine should have permitted her […]
A startup company has received a grant to create artificial meat using bio-ink and a 3D printing process.
Ilya Naishuller, a 29-year old Russian director and front man for the Moscow punk band Biting Elbows, won the Internet this week. His band’s latest stunning music video, Motherf*cker, which […]
Not content with publishing a fake newspaper, producing a fake news channel, and delivering the best satire on the Web to millions of genuine fans, the staff of The Onion […]
Poetry critic and Harvard professor Helen Vendler has published a refreshing article in Harvard magazine, in which she encourages the school to welcome mediocre students who also happen to be great writers. […]
Humans experience joy in a multitude of ways, yet the varied forms of suffering—death, divorce, separation—return to one root principle: loss. What drives the fear of loss is something far […]
I was reading a 1937 essay in which the author made casual mention of the problem of “morganatic marriage.” I’d never heard this term before. I figured it might be […]
Almost a year ago I posted a blog post titled ‘A Yale Professor’s One Man Rampage Against PloS, the Internet and a Belgian Research Group‘, covering the case of a […]
Ethan Nadelmann, a leading expert on drug policy, sees evidence that Obama is willing to move in “a somewhat new direction” on drug policy.
In 1951, musical composer and overall art theorist John Cage (shown above) stepped into an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Touted as the quietest place on Earth, the anechoic chamber […]
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
A Republican-backed bill will replace the diversity visa lottery, which offers visas to people from countries with low immigration rates to the US, with a program that focuses exclusively on people with advanced STEM degrees.
Three years ago, on December 17, 2009, the Obama administration launched its first strike on what it believed to be an AQAP training camp in southern Yemen. Unfortunately, what the […]