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That legalization of or especially creating a constitutional right to same-sex marriage will lead to a constitutional right to polygamy is a favorite “scare tactic” of social conservatives.  But Slate‘s Jillian Keenan argues, […]

You could argue that with social media, the truth is now what we all agree it is.

Now that the nonprofit service that administers the high school equivalency exam has partnered with for-profit Pearson Vue Testing to create a pricier computer-only test, 40 states are looking for alternatives.

There’s a tendency, particularly when looking at brain function, to be over-awed by the brain and, this is understandable.

Our human existence is wonderfully complicated and our culture is wonderfully complicated by pastimes and ideas and information that are entirely divorced from the evolutionary concerns of getting our genes into the next generation. 

We clever humans have figured out how to artificially activate our pleasure circuits.

Can the study of art history stop looking like ancient history itself? Can it transcend the old approaches and embrace the digital world? As digitized as art history has become […]

We are currently in the midst of one the biggest software and hardware revolutions we’ve ever witnessed. With processing power, storage, and bandwidth increasing exponentially, smart phones and smart tablets […]

1. Nicholas Thompson writes at The New Yorker: There’s something particularly devastating about an attack on a marathon. It’s an epic event in which men and women appear almost superhuman. […]

      So how terrorized will we be this time? Maybe terrorized is too strong a word. But how much more worried will we be, how much more uneasy, how much […]

Marlon Brando said one of the best things that I’ve heard about actors.  He said, “An actor is a guy who if you ain’t talking about him he ain’t listening” […]

Unfortunately, it’s not because governments are getting along with each other: Deep cuts in American and European spending were balanced out by spending increases in China and Russia.

So claims a new study that asked parents from different countries to describe their children and what they considered the “right way” to rear them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, American parenting styles stand apart.

The robot band cannot replicate the punk attitude of the Ramones or the soulfulness of B.B. King. Yet.

And the parents of children who attend the K-8 school, located in the Ozarks, are mostly happy about it, especially since guns are considered a normal part of life.

The language is odd, but Shakespeare’s insights are really universal.

Success is not about meeting someone else’s definition, but reaching your potential by defining success in your own terms. 

My father worked God knows how many jobs so I could be an artist. 

Choking is honorable failure and panicking is dishonorable failure. It’s important to maintain a line between those two things. 

There’s a limit to what the human body can do and how much it can achieve.  

There are certain traits that we don’t pay much attention to, but which actually do explain success.  So, for example, one of them you would call mind sight, which is […]

 

I’m very optimistic that we can make breakthroughs precisely by trying to take steps in the direction of a more integrated, contextualized neuroscience of consciousness.

There is nothing qualitatively different about the way the Internet is changing our human experience now than the way the invention of writing did some thousands of years ago.

One of the problems in the contemporary neuro-scientific study of consciousness is really a basic fundamental one, which is that we’ve been looking for consciousness in the wrong place.  We’ve […]

Here is a statement that shouldn’t result in anyone being called racist: I think religion is a particularly harmful way of viewing the world, because it encourages irrational thought, groupthink, […]

Now is definitely the time to take risks.  I have two daughters, both of whom are now grown and married, with kids.  One has two kids, the other almost has […]

The energy monopoly Gazprom is pushing for greater adoption of vehicles that run on natural gas. It helps that Russia is the world’s second-largest producer of the stuff.

I think it’s not always right that people should follow their passion.  There is a questionnaire that people fill out just before they enter college that has been going on […]

Big Think chief Economist Daniel Altman has a suggestion to end this long national nightmare: get rid of the corporate income tax.