Tom Jacobs of Miller-McCune reports on a study from Scott Eidelman, et al, finding that “Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism.” Here’s Jacobs’ summary: A research team led by University of […]
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It’s Sunday morning, and I’m writing this on the train from Washington, D.C. back to New York. I’m exhausted, washed out, and my calves are two knots of pain from […]
This semester, students from a diversity of majors at American University are participating in an advanced seminar I am teaching on science and environmental communication. For the first part of the […]
Last October, strangely personal fliers started appearing around New York City. They looked like this: When I first saw them, they really caught my attention. For some reason, I wasn’t […]
I’d be happy to make a bet with real money that Marx was just plain wrong about immiseration, and will continue to be proved wrong.
What is the Big Idea? Thanks to the power of social media, a new 29 minute video aimed at capturing an international criminal has been viewed more than 30 million […]
Politics makes us stupid. This is one of my recurring themes. This is the principal reason I refuse to be a partisan or ideological team player. People call me libertarian […]
In his interesting review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind last month, the philosopher John Gray makes an important point about evolution-based attempts to account for human morality. To explain […]
Andrew Chen has the valley all atwitter with his most recent post: Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. The post is well worth reading, and Andrew adds a fantastic […]
Without feeling like the victim of my own lust, I experienced freedom for the first time in my life.
“Too much experience…may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should be done that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.”
As Silicon Valley startups race to develop the next generation of sophisticated, algorithmic marketing software, it’s instructive to note the success of Thinkmodo – a viral marketing firm that films all its videos on iphones, does no market testing, and doesn’t even mention the name of the product in its campaigns.
Right after my recent post on “psychopunditry,” I came across signs of this kerfuffle between the writer Jonah Lehrer and the psychologist Christopher Chabris (not to be confused with this […]
The reassuring point of Jonah Lehrer’s new book is that neuroscientific research into the human imagination will enable us to engineer environments that foster the creativity that is every human’s birthright, rather than extinguishing it.
As NPR recently reported, there’s a high price to pay for being a black atheist in America. African Americans who come out of the closet as nonreligious may be cut […]
I’m always fascinated by pop culture products that become cultural catalysts. More specifically, I’m particularly interested in foreign exports that are so interesting, exciting, addictive or just plain weird that […]
The Etch-a-Sketch to which Mitt Romney has been disparagingly likened is a wonderful toy. The Ohio Art Company invented it in 1960, and it was one of the original inductees […]
Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason.
In 2018, the space program is scheduled to launch a probe that will get closer to the sun than any craft before it, measuring data in the star’s outer corona where temperatures are hellish.
My friend Sarah Moglia has written an essay, titled Why I Don’t Call Myself a Skeptic, that’s been making waves in the atheist blogosphere. She’s got a thought-provoking argument with […]
I’ve been grazing online, looking for a place to host my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. When I talk to event organizers at venues, you can hear them stop short, and […]
— Guest post by Emma Waldman, American University student. Scientist-turned filmmaker Randy Olson argues that it takes more than literal-minded facts and information to communicate about topics like climate change to […]
Danny Strong appeared LIVE on Big Think the day before the premiere of his controversial new HBO film Game Change, which dramatizes the decision by the McCain campaign to add […]
A 3D printer is being used to create ‘bone-like’ material which researchers claim can be used to repair injuries. The material would act like scaffolding on which new cells would grow.
California-based TED is perhaps the most visible of the groups that are leading the crossover of serious intellectual thought into the pop mainstream. TED’s approach – the 18 minute inspirational […]
In my past writings, I’ve made it a hobby to call attention to potent, but often overlooked, reasons to believe that atheism is true. Two of these that I’ve written […]
At the Reason Rally in Washington, D.C. last month, my friend Greta Christina told me something that I, a lifelong New Yorker, never knew: Harry Houdini is buried in a […]
This essay was previously published on AlterNet. The death of Christopher Hitchens in December sparked an outpouring of tributes. Most of them praised his best qualities: his ferocious courage, his […]
Slate recently highlighted the fastest-growing industries in the USA – everything from hot sauce to self-tanning products to 3D printers to generic pharmaceuticals. Here’s one industry they missed: the recycled […]
This article was previously published on AlterNet. For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became […]