In 1875 George Routledge, founder of the British publishing house that bore his name, asked Scottish author Samuel Smiles when he would have the honor of publishing one of his […]
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Science and poetry both depend on metaphor. Science typically uses at least two. The first is usually Pythagoras’s astonishingly fruitful, but also limiting, “all things are numbers.” The second shapes […]
Just about everyone wants to believe that their leaders – in governments, companies, or even the local PTA – will exude benevolence. The shared hopes of constituents, shareholders, and even […]
Michael Sandel: I think the reason we have such an impoverished public debate is that we are too reluctant to take on hard controversial, but important moral questions that really go to the heart of the question of what kind of society do we want to live in.
Capitalism, the dominant secular faith of our times, risks a reformation.
Jeff Jarvis: If the government cut off someone’s connection to the Internet they have violated their human rights.
“This is the character of the Chinese people […] unconstrained morality, in practice and theory, Heart, inward Religion, Science and Art properly so-called – is alien to it. […] The […]
Whenever we see examples of ethical or moral failure our knee-jerk reaction is to say “that was a bad person.”
Bridges do collapse. Products do blow up. Drugs that save millions of people’s lives often in the development stage kill people. This is something that you have to be very honest about.
The term ‘teacher’ has numerous connotations. The word immediately conjures images of high school biology and history. Culturally we recognize the inherent importance of those who assume such a role, […]
In one of the more interesting experiments that have been conducted, Richard J. Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wanted to find out whether facial expressions […]
It is no secret that the late rock musician Kurt Cobain felt alienated growing up. But a recently released animated video, which illustrates a lost interview he gave in 1993, reveals surprising insights about the rage he felt as a teenager and how he came to express it in punk rock.
Joel Turner was only 19 when three men broke into his house and stabbed him to death. His mother, Janet Connors, had already spent four decades as a social activist […]
Wikipedia has lost thousands of editors due to a culture of deletionism, anti-expertism, bloated bureaucracy, horrible abuses of power, and its slightly condescending founder (They all work for free because […]
I would not want to look forward to a culture where science lost and religious faith became the dominating force for truth. I would not want to live in a culture where faith lost and science, with all of its reductionism and its materialism became the sole source of truth.
How can the ethics of compromise and confrontation, as practiced in Washington, be improved?
Recently a good friend told me over a pint in our local pub that he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink for two nights. He’d been left traumatised by […]
Niall Ferguson: I’m constantly struck by the levels of historical ignorance that I encounter. In rooms full of very well-paid financial professionals, nobody appears to have read any of the major works of financial history of the last 30 or 40 years.
Recognizing corporate corruption and ending abuses of power are noble goals. But our system of overseeing, controlling, and when necessary, punishing corporations and their executives is flawed.
Throughout history ideas about gender have always tended to drift back and forth into science and then back out into the culture.
The freedom to run your own company and be able to make ethical decisions and stick to your beliefs and stick to your values is very precious and easily lost.
Dov Seidman: My fundamental idea is that how is not an adverb. It’s not a tactic.
Tesco plans to install the technology at its 450 gas stations so that it can deliver customized ads — based on age and gender — on a nearby screen. Not surprisingly, privacy advocates are concerned.
The human face is the most precise signal system we have for our emotions. We can read seven different emotions and determine whether they’re being falsified or whether they are genuine expressions.
An ordinance passed by the city council went into effect earlier this month, making West Hollywood the first municipality in the US, and possibly the world, to ban the selling of fur. Not surprisingly, high-end retailers aren’t happy.
The financial crisis may be one reason executives are flocking to classes and seminars to learn what the great Western philosophers had to say about such concepts as respect, authority, and ethics.
There’s no simple answer. Recently in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert gave us an evenhanded review of two conflicting perspectives on population levels, offering a sobering assessment of our near […]
So now that he’s been named Time‘s man of the year and all, it might be safe to say something good about Pope Francis on BIG THINK. Liberals like the […]
The Merriam-Webster people have named SCIENCE the word of the year. Why? It had “the greatest increase in look-ups” in the online version of their dictionary. This data might be […]
A few weeks ago I found myself engaged in an all-too-familiar debate. She was frustrated that I was not subscribing to her idea that ‘everything happens for a reason,’ and […]