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When Leonardo da Vinci painted at the court of Milan from 1482 through 1499, he contributed to the revolution in seeing we now know as the Renaissance. Lorenzo de’ Medici […]

Continuing a tradition I started last year, here’s a very personal, very subjective, “I can’t read everything, so I probably left out something, so mention it in the comments, OK?” […]

Apple’s patent war rages on against Samsung and Google but in what sense has something been stolen from Apple? Timothy Lee says strict patent laws harm the common good. 

With all apologies to the memory of Theodor Geisel, it’s not the Grinch stealing Christmas this year—it’s Banksy! In Cardinal Sin (above), Banksy takes a replica of an 18th century […]

As NYC police attempt to clear Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, it seems appropriate to reconsider who OWS is and what they want. To me, their goals […]

There are a number of issues at stake in the way Americans choose to think of their heritage and celebrate their creation story on Thanksgiving. After all, creation stories serve as a guide for how we function as a society today.

This column (flagged by one of our eagle-eyed editors) by Kenneth Rogoff on “rethinking the growth imperative” is incredibly puzzling. Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor and former IMF chief economist, […]

If you want to understand Occupy Wall Street and the frustration, rage and sadness that drive it, you could do worse than to watch White Christmas. That’s the 1954 confection […]

While walking in Fairmount Park in 1872 with his minister father, 12-year-old Henry Ossawa Tanner saw a man painting and became curious about art. His family fed that curiosity, which […]

In each generation, our most brilliant thinkers lay the foundations on which lesser lights will build a new, bloated bureaucracy of the mind. Can experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats help us break the cycle? 

Ah retirement…you know the vision – vistas of long beaches, fairways, sunsets with umbrella drinks. Baloney. This imagery worked as an ideal for those who thought they might retire early […]

When we habituate to something, our physical and psychological response becomes so used to it that whatever the “it” is stops being arousing. 

Charles Murray wrote a piece on economic inequality and cultural factors that contribute to it in the Wall Street Journal. He vividly describes inequalities between two groups of white Americans, […]

Breaking Dawn Part 1, the latest film version of Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling Twilight saga sank a stake into the weekend box office pulling in an estimated $283.5 million worldwide. A […]

Last month saw the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II. Sadly, that day of infamy led to a different […]

Peer into any young American boy’s imagination, and you’ll likely find knights, soldiers, and pirates roaming about. That fact is a true today as it was a century ago. One […]

THIS BLOG WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE HUFFINGTON POST ON FEBRUARY 9, 2011 Romance fades.  Everyone knows this. The first flush of true love in marriage mellows into something less […]

The urge to predict is understandable. We forecast the future, and continue to do so even after repeated mistakes, because of the deep psychological need for a sense of control, to keep ourselves safe.

This has been a big week for the U.S. domestic airline industry and its embrace of environmentally-friendly biofuels. On Monday, a United Airlines jet completed the first-ever biofuel-powered commercial flight […]

Since March of this year, a series of extraordinary paper sculptures has appeared in various locations around Edinburgh, Scotland. Each location is a library or other institution devoted to the […]

by Michael Garfield “As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognized here below, the […]

As the assault of comic book superhero-featuring movies over the past few years attests, the men and women in tights serve today as the closest thing American culture has to […]

During his lifetime, Diego Rivera stood as one of the most important and controversial artists in the world. Today, thanks to the international feminist phenomenon of Frida Kahlo (who stood […]

Probably.

“Knowledge is limited,” Albert Einstein once said, “imagination encircles the world.” A new program at the CERN physics laboratory, home to the Large Hadron Collider, takes Einstein’s words as their […]

Have you ever poked around in the “People You May Know” box in Facebook? For the first few score people, it’s a pleasure. Click: A person I forgot I knew. […]

One of the themes in my book that elicited attention was my “new monogamy” section, where I explore ethically non-monogamous marriages, and the gray zone of don’t ask, don’t tell […]

It’s hard to normalize the celebrity marriage and divorce for the rest of us.  After all, we’re highly unlikely to end up married to an immigrant ex-bodybuilder, mega-Hollywood action star turned Governor who impregnates a member of our full-time housekeeping staff. These divorces should be consigned to the marriage equivalent of a Special Victims Unit.  

I gave the case for some kind of kidney markets in my last post.  The limited commodification of that particular part of the body is the only way, for now, for […]

“Asked to imagine prehistoric human sex, most of us conjure the hackneyed image of the caveman, dragging a dazed woman by her hair with one hand, a club in the […]