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The top African-American chess player defied the conventional wisdom that you need to learn the game in preschool to become a grandmaster.

“It is easy to talk about great ideas as if they were light-bulb moments, sudden epiphanies where everything comes together at once…but that’s rarely how it works.”

If Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, would he be counseling us on how to find happiness, or would he merely be setting an example of how to […]

“David Simon, the creator TV hit ‘The Wire’, has it in writing from as unimpeachable a source as you could think of: he is a genius.” And he gets $500,000 for it.

“When did Halloween become, to use the marketing phrase of the moment, spooktacular?” The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean reflects on simpler Halloweens of yesteryear.

So, I am on the email list for Stratfor, an intelligence group, although I generally delete them. There is only so much time in a day. But today’s was titled […]

Friday December 17 marked the one year anniversary of the US air strikes in Majalla, which killed, along with some al-Qaeda operatives, a number of women and children. The incident […]

The stories intertwine on the point of personality: is Mark Zuckerberg a genius? Is Julian Assange? At what point does (at least in Aaron Sorkin’s vision of the Facebook founder, […]

In his new book, bestselling author Steven Johnson discusses the history and sources of innovation. Johnson asks: Where do good ideas come from?

“In fairy tales, ‘good’ triumphs over ‘evil,’ but how this happens isn’t simple. It’s quite common for traditional fairy tales to have complicated, even troubling, conclusions.”

I have been religiously watching the TEDTalks series, a group of videos produced by TED. Overall I’ve been mostly impressed with the speakers, very cool stuff. Here’s an EXCELLENT spoken […]

Turnout in U.S. midterm elections averages a dismal 40%. The lamest excuse not to vote is that there’s no one good to vote for. That’s chipper talk. As a hardcore […]

Part of being a postmodern conservative is being open to the truth of the distinctively personal LOGOS of Christianity, to the possibility that the Christian understanding of being a person is […]

The word “occult” is loaded with all sorts of associations. To some it conjures images of devil worship and witchcraft; to others it is just a concoction of superstition and […]

It is not often that a celebrity memoir makes the leap from the front page of the New York Times Arts section to its Op-Ed page, but then what less […]

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JASON SILVA AND TECHNO-ECOLOGIC SCHOLAR RICHARD DOYLE Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important interconnections are to him – and how transformative, […]

The world’s top mathematics prize that outshines even the Nobel, the Fields Medal ceremony in India contrasts the romanticized and turbulent life of mathematical revolutionaries.

“I’ll be your mirror,” The Velvet Underground sang in the song of the same name, “Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know.” In The Moment of Caravaggio, Michael […]

Stephen Hawking’s latest book Grand Design sits atop the Amazon best-seller list and has been the subject of gobal news attention and debate.  Driving discussion (and sales) is Hawking’s “no […]

As the Sunday NY Times details, strategist Steve Schmidt has turned around the McCain campaign with brilliant advertising that sets the news agenda and primes voter evaluations. The former Rove […]

Writing in the New York Review of Books blog, Notre Dame professors John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby recently provided a useful lesson on the history of religious discrimination […]

Consumption of marijuana should be legal, but selling it should not be. Mark Kleiman at The Atlantic fears marketers would peddle the vice just as they have alcohol and fast food.

Talk about hubris… Dirty trickster James O’Keefe’s foray into gonzo porn has ended disastrously for him. O’Keefe schemed to seduce CNN investigative reporter Abbie Boudreau in front of hidden cameras. […]

Bill Maher’s mockumentary Religulous opens in theaters on Friday. Judging by Maher’s media interviews, it’s more of the same type of sophomoric ridicule that has been so self-defeating to the […]

Is there a truly “revolutionary” element in the current surge of anger in American politics? What is the place of madness and irrationality in revolution? If we want to speak […]

Mark McKinnon was the genius behind Bush’s 2004 media strategy. The Bush campaign successfully portrayed Bush as “a strong leader in a time of change” while redefining Kerry as “weak, […]

Google, whose genius was born in the search engine, is now looking at itself from beyond the grave. CEO Erich Schmidt is preparing his company for the next round of […]

In a guest post today, AoE culture correspondent Patrick Riley takes a look at the efforts by James McCartney and other Beatles offspring to escape the celebrity penumbra of their […]

One of the most wonderful things about the emerging global superbrain is that information is overflowing on a scale beyond what we can wrap our heads around.

When we think of Sigmund Freud, we think first of words—the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis, books such as The Interpretation of Dreams, and the infamous Freudian slip. In Mirrors of […]