“What happens to our civic life when we’re all too scared to participate?” asks Slate. Expert witnesses have recently refused to testify in court, fearing reprisal for divulging their political views.
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As summer is upon us, what does psychological research tell us about how we spend our leisure time? The answers could provide for a more enjoyable vacation in the coming months.
“The nature and depth of the financial crisis is forcing us to reconsider some of the basic tenets of financial theory,” says Paul Volcker who maps his ideas for reform in The NY Review of Books.
The New Statesman ruminates on what democracy might look like in an Islamic republic, what Eastern countries are tending that way, and why the West must make tough compromises.
“When something is free, you tend to use more of it. It’s true for buffets and open bars, and it’s the same with carbon,” says The Atlantic while advocating for a carbon tax to slow global warming.
Walking through the Late Renoirexhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently, I couldn’t help but be struck by the power of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings of his three sons—Pierre, Jean, […]
Personally, I remember back in the 1970s when string theory fell out of favor. At the time, it was very difficult to get a job and many people dismissed the […]
On Thursday, Republicans blocked an attempt to lift the liability cap for oil companies for the fourth time. Although BP has agreed to establish a $20 billion fund to pay […]
We imagine spying in terms of cutting edge technology and clandestine intrigue, but a lot of important intelligence work involves more mundane strategies like reading newspapers. In recent years, cash-strapped […]
I spend a lot of time on my laptop. Too much time? Don’t know, don’t care. C’est la vie (moderne), etc. But what does irk me is that I’m stuck […]
When Facebook’s privacy woes hit the webosphere, people quickly fell into two camps: those who believed that we now “live in public” and should accept it, and those who were […]
“Fog in Channel, Continent isolated” is one of the better remembered British newspaper front page headlines, but as the new Coalition Government here in London takes its swingeing axe to […]
“The causes of underfunded pensions are similar throughout the developed world,” says the L.A. Times while commenting on France’s recent move to increase the retirement age.
The Big Money shines light on for-profit colleges that take federal money but use far more revenue for recruitment and marketing than for educating their students—a higher education crisis?
Physicists have developed an experiment involving super cold matter and an empty elevator shaft that will test one concept crucial to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
“Reality is already outpacing ‘Minority Report,’ the 2002 film that imagined technology in far-off 2054: Pre-crime systems, 3D video and gesture-based computing are already here,” says The New York Times.
Miller-McCune reports that, “Using artificial intelligence and the graphics techniques behind ‘Avatar,’ a USC institute creates ‘virtual humans’ and interactive immersions that train American soldiers.”
The New Yorker was my introduction to contemporary literary fiction years ago when I was a pre-teenager looking for something outside of the confines of my small town public library. […]
“As counterintuitive as it may be to say so, oil is a green fuel, while ‘green’ fuels aren’t,” says Jonah Goldberg, who makes a sobering and conservative assessment of America’s need for black gold.
Naomi Klein takes stock of the Gulf oil spill and finds a deeper meaning beneath mechanical failure on Deepwater Horizon: the West’s cultural hubris in thinking it can control Nature.
For the first time, researchers have cataloged forty distinct signals orangutans use to communicate with each other, including gestures for “I want to play” and “Give it to me”.
Art critic Karen Wright charts her run-ins with English painter David Hockney over the last ten years. The prolific painter has taken to photography and even drawing on his iPhone.
Ten years after sequencing the entire human genome, some call the achievement a false start; The Economist calls it only the beginning of a marathon that has begun to revolutionize biology.
In the wake of Arizona’s controversial law empowering police to stop and detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally, Arizona Republicans are working on legislation that would deny […]
“I think I’m beginning to know something about painting,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir said on the day he died as he turned away from a still life he’d been working on and […]
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. […]
Erik Rasmussen, founder of the Copenhagen Climate Council, doesn’t try to pretend that COP 15 was anything but a failure. The talks concluded without a global climate treaty, and Rasmussen […]
Last year, betacup extended a challenge to the creative community to rethink the coffee cup from a sustainable angle that eliminates the 58 million disposable cups America tosses in the […]
At what point does graphic violence and sex turn a literary work into pornography? What are the merits of a story filled with imagery so shocking that it forces some […]
Bard College President Leon Botstein believes that for about half of the high school students in the U.S., college should begin at age 16. “We should have a system that […]