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Meet the people paid to rouse the workers of industrial Britain.

Democratic freedom, rapturous religion, and newspapers created a hotbed for social experimentation in 19th-century America.

Here’s your gateway to enjoying the best of literature.

The popular game has a backstory rife with segregation, inequality, intellectual theft, and outlandish political theories.

Bears, chimps, or humans? A track of five poorly preserved footsteps at Laetoli has puzzled paleontologists for decades. Now, a research paper from Nature claims to have solved the mystery.

The key? A computational flattening algorithm.

The peasant turned czarist advisor has come to be known and feared as the devil incarnate, but was he really as demonic as we have been led to believe?

The unfamiliar landscape of America’s medical past is marked by bizarre incidents, forgotten breakthroughs and selfless sacrifice.

Of all the injustices in Nobel Prize history, her 1957 Nobel snub is the most egregious. One of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century was the discovery of […]

They didn’t know it, but the rituals of Iron Age Scandinavians turned their iron into steel.

In the Western world, there’s a constant pressure to be happy. Paradoxically, this makes people more prone to anxiety and depression.

The controversy over whether Jesus had any siblings is reignited after an amazing new discovery of an ancient text.

As horrific as the Orlando Massacre was, we must not forget the Wounded Knee Massacre, the single worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

Studies show that television shows featuring minorities help us ease our attitudes toward people who are “different.” We look back at the past thirty years and see how that came to be.

Christmas may be Jesus’ “birthday,” but, as any mother will tell you, his mother Mary really deserves the applause. Providing the humanity half to join with Christ’s divine side, Mary volunteered to play a part from the Incarnation to the Crucifixion to the Resurrection as everything from an active participant to an interested bystander, depending on your interpretation of Christian scripture. 

Maybe you’ve never heard of Emmaland or Sophialand, but if you’re reading this in the United States, there’s a better than 90% chance that you live in either one of […]

1. Are Intelligent Machines a Threat to ‘Human Exceptionalism’? “Is it time to take seriously the prospect of artificial intelligence emulating human abilities?” Yes, says Ray Kurzweil in his book How to Create a […]

The human mind likes simplicity. It’s a complicated world, so we filter it into one cohesive and easy-to-digest worldview. This perspective is a rather unscientific one, however. When we observe […]

The year of magical thinking about marriage, reproduction and vaginas (see reviews of Naomi’s Wolf’s hilariously trashed book) continues.  The conservative Heritage Foundation released a report last week that reprises […]

War is hell. The culture war is no exception—and the funny bone is usually the first casualty. The recent talk about abortion and contraception got me thinking, what would the […]

The multi-million dollar estates of the stars in Beverly Hills and the “abandominiums” of impoverished neighborhoods in rustbelt cities such as my own of Baltimore have something in common: they’re […]

I’m nonplussed by Mary Elizabeth Williams’ comment today, over at Salon, that Anthony Weiner’s impending fatherhood “drastically changed” the Weinergate drama. Not that I disagree that “the timing of Weiner’s […]

Public opinion about climate change, observes the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, can be compared to “waves in a shallow pan,” easily tipped with “a lot of sloshing but not […]