In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
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Wait until you see what happens when the debate over copyright is extended beyond music, film, video games and books and into the realm of physical objects like sneakers and toys.
An angelic lady from the pre-raphaelite school of femmes fatales is stretched across a map of Europe. Her raised hands clutch a sketch of the late-19th-century European rail network at two of […]
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 […]
With respect to the cosmos, mankind has just been born. Hypothetically, if our 14 billion-year-old universe were scaled down to just 10 years (for the sake of comparison), dinosaurs would […]
“[T]he Author of Nature has determin’d us to receive… a Moral Sense, todirect our Actions, and to give us still nobler Pleasures.” That appeal was made in 1725 by Scottish philosopher […]
The idea of artists running museums sounds to many like allowing the inmates to run the asylum. A profile in the current issue of The New Yorker of Tate Gallery […]
[Author’s Note: In keeping with the tradition that whenever you have a blog post whose title is a question, the answer is always “no”…] Of all the essays I’ve written, […]
Christian Lorentzen makes an excellent point excellently: Tougher for the novelist are the tasks of rendering convincing characters across the class spectrum and capturing economic intricacies in a way that’s […]
The notion that we have a three-dimensional map inside our heads is an illusion, says a British neuroscientist. Instead, we locate our surroundings along horizontal and vertical planes.
The Matrix is real… and everyone here at NASA for the GSP has taken the red pill. If you recall in the movie, Neo is startled, puzzled, and quite frankly […]
Once limited to making one-off prototypes, 3D printers are advancing rapidly. Already they are used to make durable airplane parts and may be used to revolutionize architecture.
Reductionists believe that memories, emotions, and feelings can be broken down to nothing more than interactions between brain cells and their associated molecules. In other words, “you” are your brain.
What’s the Big Idea? There are not only wrong answers — there are also wrong questions, says Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and author of Big Think’s most recent Book of the Month. And sometimes […]
My brother Erik Nisbet, a professor of communication at The Ohio State University, will be giving a free webinar today on climate change communication, sponsored by the Changing Climate project […]
Americans for the past decade seem more caught up than ever in the idea of what it is to be an American, especially in an election year and perhaps never […]
I’ve long argued that there’s a natural alliance betweenatheism and feminism, for the same reason that there’s a natural alliance between atheism and GLBT activism: because we all understand what […]
In 1923, during an exhibition of his art collection that would become the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, two years later, Dr. Albert C. Barnes told an interviewer, “I am […]
Technological change is quickly arriving which will transform society on a scale similar to England’s textile mills and Ford’s production line, if governments allow the changes to occur.
Even economists aren’t satisfied with gross domestic product and incomes anymore. Now we also want to know how happy people are and how much they feel they can realize their potential.
I’ve always suspected, to paraphrase an adage from evolutionary science, that the marriage replicates the wedding. The wedding’s style is a germinal expression of the marriage to come, its strengths, […]
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.
Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, “that […]
The demographic of “Ph.D.-holding, football fiend women who listen to their local call-in sports shows” is probably small. So I wasn’t the intended audience for theDr. Pepper 10 commercial that […]
The Daily Mail published an article this week by Samantha Brick, called, “There are Downsides to Looking This Pretty: Why Women Hate Me for Being Beautiful.” Problem is, according to […]
Fashion never sleeps apparently, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Asia where lifestyle related online start-ups are springing up faster than you can say “buy me that Birkin.” […]
Note: Before you comment to say “This is not going to change the mind of someone who would issue a death threat”, please don’t. That’s not my point. Ask yourself […]
This week, the first orders of the $25 Raspberry Pi computer began shipping. Its designers expect a plethora of new technology as a result—and a new generation of programmers.
Once again, I’ve gotten enmeshed in a debate on Twitter. This time it wasn’t with a theist, but with two atheists, Daniel Loxton and Reed Esau. It started with these […]
There are so many things wrong with this story. First, a children’s author parodied the famous Aesop fable of The Tortoise and the Hare, substituting a pineapple for the tortoise. […]