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Parodies of Kim Jong-un and North Korea are indicative of the scary reality that we simply don’t have a lot of information about what is actually happening inside North Korea. 

Imagine that you are making your way through a dense jungle. Thick vegetation makes it difficult to see more than few feet in front of you. Suddenly, you break through […]

While the desire to tax churches is not new, it seems as far from reality as possible at this moment. As has been commented, no atheist could possibly hope to […]

Although the initial riots and flare-ups of violence over the “Innocence of Muslims” video were over a month ago, the global battle over blasphemy laws is still raging. In London […]

Savita Halappanavar is dead, and she shouldn’t be. That has to be the beginning and end of anything anyone writes about this. Savita was 31 years old, married, four months […]

We have a blind spot when it comes to predicting our own moral and ethical behavior, but new research suggests we are better, not worse, when part of a crowd. 

Thirty-five years after their launch, the two Voyager deep space probes are about to enter interstellar space, while still transmitting data back to Earth.

Mitt Romney, the candidate who has made a career out of shifting his positions to suit the political climate and maximize his electoral prospects, may have gone too far with […]

[Editor’s Note: It’s happening again. I hadn’t gotten any of these messages since last year, and I was starting to hope that the wormhole, or whatever strange conduit it was, […]

It was this map of Greenland that triggered this post. I say map, but I mean hole in a drainpipe.  This picture was sent in by Ruland Kolen, who was […]

So I hope I didn’t offend either American Conservatives or crunchy conservatives in my previous post.  I was trying to burst stereotypes about conservatives in general for an audience unfamiliar […]

Part 1. Monkeys There’s an apocryphal story about monkeys – based loosely on a real experiment – that goes something like this: Stage 1. Monkeys 1, 2, 3, 4, and […]

Mark 2012 down as the year that we finally saw traditional political polls for what they are – a form of voodoo black magic mixed with Machiavellian pseudoscience. With only 10 […]

With a tween in the house I’ve rediscovered the ruthless economy of cool. I’ve remembered that cool is as unforgiving of bad timing as the stock market. One minute the […]

Hurricane Sandy has introduced significant uncertainty into next Tuesday’s presidential election. But even without a natural disaster hobbling transportation and cutting off power to as many as 10 million people […]

Is there any more famous footage of an artist at work than Hans Namuth’s film of Jackson Pollock? More than half a century after Pollock’s death, the “Jack the Dripper” […]

By Zane Friedkin (guest blogger) The drone war being waged by the Obama administration in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia has elicited more media attention than is typical of […]

Modern campaigns have rarely focused on the issues, but in the 2012 election the level of moral outrage and anger is unprecedented.  Even before the campaign, America was divided, but […]

Could the unforgiving Taklamakan Desert once have been the location of the Garden of Earthly Delights?

Anxiety rates have risen in our country for the last four decades. Sociologists blame the increased number of choices we have and the failure of the mythical American meritocracy. 

There are many ways to look at Europe other than as a collection of nation-states. Plenty of other imagined communities lurk beneath the surface of the standard political map. Check […]

The Partido Revolucionario Institucional has returned to power after a twelve-year hiatus. Previously, it ruled the nation’s politics for 70 years, allowing drug cartels to operate with impunity. 

      Derecho Alert!!!!!! AAAIIIGGGHHH!!!! Grab the kids! Run for the basement, quick!       As this is being written a line of severe thunderstorms is sweeping across sections of the Northeast […]

After years of hearing about the Social Media Revolution, many of the rebellious, counter-culture figures are starting to disappear to the sidelines as the big money Wall Street investors and traditional […]

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 […]

This is part 3 of my review of Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. Read Part 1 here and part 2 here. In my previous post, I discussed […]

All apologies to Michael Jackson, but in the art world, Andy Warhol will always be the King of Pop. The bewigged eccentric didn’t start Pop Art, but his works largely […]

Despite the political issues and the economic slowdown in China, it is still a growing country. Experts believe its economy will continue to remain strong for a while.

“They always say time changes things,” Andy Warhol once said, “but you actually have to change them yourself.” Warhol simultaneously embodied and changed his time—a combination that continues to work […]

On September 30, 2011, The New York Times reported that the C.I.A. had killed a fundamentalist iman named Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike over Yemen. Heralding the strike, President […]