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While the Obama Administration was busy foiling yet another terror plot yesterday, the GOP presidential candidates at the debate sponsored by Bloomberg TV and the Washington Post looked like they […]

My previous post, “The Blinding Fog of Religious Moderation“, drew some criticism from people who felt that I was unjustly lumping moderate believers together with fundamentalists. So, in this post, […]

Influential neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran explains some mirror experiments you can try at home to better understand how your brain perceives the world around it. 

Nobody’s so politically correct as to be offended by Happy Thanksgiving. From a merely historical point of view, maybe we should be more sensitive.

So my post on whether or not higher education is worth it got a lot of responses, mostly negative. Many of the respondents chimed in through email and want to […]

The U.S. is historically a Christian country. It’s not just that 3 out of 4 Americans identify themselves as Christian. It’s that the colonists who fought in the American revolution […]

Does a wandering mind make you less happy than a present mind? This question formed the basis of an important study by psychologists from Harvard University. The answer, I wasn’t surprised to find, is yes. Absolutely.  

My friend Jason Brennan, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, offers a short and sweet argument against the death penalty: Even if we grant for the sake of argument that […]

1. So my post on NASA provoked a variety of most thoughtful responses.  The ones by Brendan were the most detailed and philosophic, but they were all worthwhile.  2. Their […]

We all draw as kids, yet most of us stop drawing somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade. Doodles seem unserious by then, and adulthood only makes us less likely […]

Despite what we believe about our powers of introspection, the reality is that we know awfully little about what our conscious experience amounts to.

The scientific concept that will most impact our world is the idea that will unify two opposite ideas, those of Newton and Einstein, says Big Thinker Ajitkumar Tampi Trivikram.

The fascinating billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel (a Facebook guy, the PayPal guy etc.) seems to be carrying the day against the educational establishment in answering this question negatively. He’s teamed up […]

At the New York Times’ Opinionator blog, Steven Mazie urges Occupy Wall Street to take inspiration from the late, great political philosopher John Rawls: Rawls’s boldest claim — that inequality […]

Great Big Ideas, the first Floating University course, features twelve of the most important thinkers and practitioners in their fields. These lecturers are constantly making news, and in this blog, […]

At the newly launched Breakthrough Journal, sociologist Fred Block re-visits Daniel Bell’s classic work The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism providing insight on the rise of Tea Party conservatism, the revolt […]

It turns out that the phrase “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” did not originate with Gloria Steinem, but rather was inspired by another phrase: […]

Bravo to Canadian literary legend Margaret Atwood for waging online warfare against library closings this week. When Toronto councillor Doug Ford floated some made-up statistics about the number of libraries […]

Last Friday, I posted a piece in The Stone at The New York Times suggesting the work of philosopher John Rawls as an intellectual touchstone for the Occupy Wall Street […]

“Women are conflicted in ten different directions today,” “Shirin” tells me. She’s an accomplished, unmarried woman in her 40s, living in Los Angeles.  She continues, “They know you cannot have […]

BY JASON SILVA “We are enraptured prose-beings raised to the highest power”. – Walter Benjamin, On Hashish Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller called themselves “performing philosophers”, using the power of […]

In an illuminating recent paper, “Capitalism in the Classical and High Liberal Tradition” [$$$], University of Pennsylvania philosopher Samuel Freeman seeks to offer some justification for the secondary status conferred […]

So I’m in Seattle at the meeting of the American Political Science Association. The APSA meeting has to be one of the diverse and tolerant academic associations in the world.  […]

Here we find a most lucid talk on the ethics of the uninhibited pursuit of indefinite longevity.  The speaker (Mr. Stolyarov) criticizes me, David Brooks, and Daniel Callahan for being pro-death, which is […]

Artist and recluse Terrence Malick is this year’s winner of the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. But it has been left to Brad Pitt to explain the film director’s unique working style. 

Carl Scott is probably the blogworld’s leading expert on the content of rock music (both words and music).  He calls that content, once in a while, its ideological dimension. Carl both is […]

I debated the excellent libertarian author Ronald Bailey over this question at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.  Ron has already responded to me here.  Before I respond to him, I thought […]

The title of Nathan Mhyrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, a 40 lb. compendium of food history and philosophy, is meant to evoke the radicalism of 20th-century artists like Picasso and Pound, whose motto was “make it new.”

When we are in a state of unforgiveness, we hold on to negative emotions that adversely affect the healing process, says professor of philosophy and stress management Rita Schiano.

What did you do, really, when Irene struck? As you listen to people tell tales that make them sound more threatened, more casual-cool or more heroic than they really were, […]