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New businesses in Silicon Valley and Alley have tremendous power over what it will mean to be human in the coming decades. And with great power comes great responsibility. We hear often that the world is changing fast – we talk less about what we’d like it to change into.

Ever since antiquity we have been searching for perfect mathematical equations to explain a perfect Universe. Now a Japanese mathematician may have cracked an unsolved problem “at the center of everything.” 

Can an idea that looks backward also look forward? That question hangs over the the Tate Britain’s new exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at the same moment that it celebrates the […]

Mitt Romney dug himself a deep hole this week when Mother Jones released a secretly recorded video of him speaking to a group of millionaires and complaining that 47 percent […]

“Danger: Art Inside,” read the labels on the crated sculptures as I toured last month the almost-ready-for-public-viewing, but now restored, reinstalled, and reinterpreted Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The signs […]

So I’ve gotten some touching emails asking whether I was sick or dead because I hadn’t blogged for almost a whole week.  Well, I was sick with an unfashionable or […]

Are we somehow becoming “more than human”? 

The discovery of the Higgs boson was a real milestone for physics, a tremendous vindication of the hard work of thousands of physicists and engineers for the past 30 years. […]

A second Mona Lisa? One made even earlier than the one hanging in the Louvre? It sounds almost too good to be true, and probably is. A Swiss-based organization calling […]

Fashion, like art, knocks the dust off of life.

Female Olympians are rightly angry that their bodies have been criticized in petty ways. The Brazilian soccer team was called “a bit chubby,” and weightlifters have been called “fat” and […]

We’re a fat nation for the simple reason that we hate bodies.

Toni Morrison bucks accepted wisdom when it comes to calling divorce an irreparable tragedy and likens reality television to a previous public’s fascination with lynching black people. 

Beyond the esoteric physical findings of the Large Hadron Collider, discovering evidence of the Higgs boson represents a milestone for human reason and is, more generally, a celebration of life. 

Cognitive science exists in a golden era. The amount of resources pouring into research that examines human nature is unmatched by any other time in history.

Perhaps the world’s most fiercely original aerospace engineer, Rutan has pioneered beautifully designed aircraft that (successfully) go against the grain of conventional wisdom. 

Hitchens finds time to joke, to be scared and weak, and to attack belief in prayer on its own terms.

There’s an indelible story in Jim Collins’ Good to Great about Admiral Jim Stockdale, a war hero who survived torture as a POW in Vietnam. From Collins’ book: “I never […]

Along with Romney’s 13% tax bill and Pussy Riot, the other media sensation of recent weeks has been cheaters.  After Jonah Lehrer’s sloppy multitasking and Fareed Zakaria’s “journalistic lapse,” now […]

Editors’ Note: So the first week of Ideas Gone Wild has passed! We got tons of great submissions on the theme of the Olympics. So good, in fact, that we’re […]

Let’s face a sad truth: To be a book lover in the 21st century is a hard task. In the world of the knowledge economy and of constantly being plugged […]

You’d think that a giant retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC would, at least momentarily, make George Bellows the king of the art ring. But once […]

By smashing atoms of gold together at near-light speeds, scientists have created a primordial plasma state that existed for only one-millionth of second after the Big Bang occurred.

What hasn’t been said about Louis C.K.? The New York Times called him a “comedic Quentin Tarantino.” Writing for the Los Angeles Book Review Adam Wilson said he was “television’s […]

Dear Paris Hilton You probably don’t remember me. We met briefly once, years ago. It was when you bought a book on numerology and astrology from a store I worked […]

We expect works of art to enlighten us, and we expect science to enlighten us — yet the two fields are frequently regarded as separate, distinct entities which we respond to using different areas of the brain. Are those distinctions are arbitrary?

When I struggle to wrap my head around a problem, I often turn to art to help me literally picture the big issue and, I hope, guide me to an […]

What’s the Big Idea? Lionel Richie is a meme phenomenon. His music video “Hello” has inspired countless people to share both image and video pastiches of him all over the internet. […]

So I’m not a big fan of convention speeches.  I certainly don’t think they make a permanent difference in the campaign.  Any “bump” is temporary.  Remember, after all, that the […]

Judging by what I’ve beenreadingonline, BBcreams, an all-in-one treatment/moisturizer/makeup/sunscreen mashup that first gained popularity among Korean actresses and starlets and is now used by almost every other gal in North […]