Dr. Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, says he has never owned a car. While he admits his decision may seem “unusual” to people in the […]
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“How did we get to the point where just about every new classical dance is meaningless?” asks Laura Jacobs. She thinks premieres today all feel derivative of Forsythe, Tharp, or Martins—or trade in clichés.
Nick Kristof has an idea for fixing the Catholic Church: Turn it “upside down”! Take power away from the “old boys’ club” at the Vatican, where a dark cloud hovers […]
Today marks the first installment of Big Think’s newest series, “Moments of Genius,” sponsored by Intel. We sat down with math and science thought leaders—from the inventor of the very […]
The distances separating the stars are so vast that it would take a very advanced civilization—perhaps thousands or even millions of years more advanced than ours—to bridge those distances. In […]
What kinds of incentives are necessary to get people to lead more environmentally responsible lives? Ernst Weizsäcker, co-chair of the U.N. International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, says that we […]
Today I respond to Francis’ most recent post: an objection to the L.A. Times’ use of e-commerce links in its online edition to generate ad revenue. In this case, I […]
Why don’t people notice that Apple has no qualms pressuring the police to barge into the homes of journalists? Or that we are now automatically signed on with our Facebook ID on 50,000 websites, all of which have added this functionality just in the last week? No, we are too busy standing in line for hours to buy the iPad or checking if our Facebook friends like Lady Gaga as much as we do to take stock of what’s really happening behind the curtains.
I was tooling around the internet for awhile yesterday, looking for a transcript of the Congressional hearings that featured Goldman Sachs executives and traders as the star witnesses, before I […]
Don’t look now, but “femivores” are back in the news. Femivores, if you recall, are women who embrace ultra-local food production as feminist statement. Usually this involves some kind of […]
With exactly 40 Earth Days in its wake, the US has come a long way on conservation awareness. But when we think about Earth and all that ails her, we’re […]
When literary critics like Lionel Trilling wrote in the 1950s and ’60s, they wrote for “a readership of people who believed that your taste in literature or your taste in […]
Islam is not a monolithic religion or a single coherent ideology, any more than Christianity is. Yet many people—as I discovered in the comments on my last article—are willing to […]
Do you frequent porn sites? If you do, you’ll be pleased to know that you are a customer of one of the most tech-savvy industries in the world. It’s a […]
When evangelist Franklin Graham—son of the better known Billy Graham—had his invitation to the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service rescinded after Muslim members of the military complained about comments […]
“Who is Nick Clegg?” I hear you ask? Well, actually I don’t really hear many of you asking at all. And you may be forgiven. Until a week ago he […]
There have been countless fictional portrayals of fake American presidents in pop culture. From the alien-battling President Thomas Whitmore in “Independence Day” to hopeless romantic President Andrew Shepherd in “the […]
Ernst Weizsäcker, Co-chair of the U.N. International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, believes that we could be doing five times better than we are when it comes to addressing global […]
For Matthew Malin and Andrew Goetz, a business was born from a bar of soap. For most of his life, Goetz washed his face, body, hair and shaved with the […]
Conservative Christians used their lobbying muscle to create a gaping loophole in health care reform’s individual mandate, reports Sarah Posner in the American Prospect. Members of so-called Health Care Sharing […]
If you have been reading the op-ed pages lately, you have begun to notice in the last week or so that a subtle change in their rhetoric is taking place. […]
Imagine how different your life would be if next Earth Day a year from now, you supplied the power to this computer—by pedaling, churning or dancing. The way these students […]
Is there anything we can do about the global increase in tropical storms? Ernst Weizsäcker, co-chair of the U.N.’s International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, thinks Hurricane Katrina may have […]
Here at Mind Matters we strive to be your full-service source of octopus-cognition news. And in my last post on that, I described humans making videos for octopuses. So it’s […]
“If it’s any good, [literature] can make you feel less alone in the world...It gives you some late-night company with your memories and your sorrow.Literature does touch people; it’s not […]
“A few snapshots.” According to novelist Tim O’Brien, that’s all our minds retain of our childhoods, adulthoods, and even the people we’ve loved most deeply. “And that’s memory? Little remnant […]
“It has been clear to me since the time of the commission that I led in the ’80’s, that no doubt the historic responsibility for where we are has to […]
There’s been no end of talk these past few weeks about the iPad’s revolutionary potential: how you don’t have to choose between a smart phone and a laptop any more, […]
Where has the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) been? Many of the trades that led to the financial meltdown were legal, but many clearly were not. Even if you can’t […]
If you are up too late, and the TV is on, chances are at some point you will hear the “bom bom bom bom bom” of Law and Order’s iconic […]