I’ve been thinking in speculative directions lately, and nothing is more speculative than the question of whether we’ll one day be able to extend the human lifespan. The notion of […]
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Late on Friday afternoon, AQAP posted this video “appeal” from a Saudi diplomat. The man, Abdullah al-Khalidi, is the deputy Saudi consul in Aden. He was kidnapped several weeks ago […]
Rosalind Franklin was instrumental to the discovery of DNA, but as the film photograph 51 demonstrates, hers was a life out of balance.
The blogosphere won’t stop talking about the Facebook IPO story. The stock (FB), which has been publicly traded for less than 2 weeks, has fallen below $30/share and the bearish […]
What is the Big Idea? Residents of Ciudad Juárez, home of the highest murder rate in Mexico, now have some relief from the violence through a virtual reality therapy program […]
Several video game companies have released mind-reading headsets that let players control virtual objects. Psychiatrists say the technology could help improves patients’ mental health.
What’s the Big Idea? Our Lady of Lourdes appears 18 times to a miller’s daughter collecting firewood in a small market town in France. A young woman leads an army through […]
What’s the Big Idea? What does it mean to be connected in the 21st century? Hope, interdependence, and possibly the creation of a new consciousness, says Tiffany Shlain. Shlain is the […]
To solicit financial support from the public, something the government has made easier recently, it helps to create funding tiers that allow you to connect personally with your audience.
Jane McGonigal discusses the skills we learn from gaming and how can they help us enhance, rather than detract from our ambitions as humans.
What’s the Big Idea? On May 20, Pakistan shut down Twitter for eight hours after the microblogging site refused to remove tweets that linked to a page encouraging people to post pictures […]
Facebook is working to release its own brand of smartphone. After a $16 billion payday at its IPO, the company has found it needs to justify its paycheck, especially as ad revenues decline.
Access to mobile computing, to allow employees to check email outside of working hours, increases productivity up to a point. After that it just burns people out and makes them unhappy.
I don’t know why this still surprises me (particularly since expressions like the one in the title to this post have been floating around for several hundred years), but whenever […]
A Russian Internet security firm has discovered what is perhaps the world’s most complicated computer virus ever. Given its complexity, a specific country may be behind the attacks.
New facial recognition technology that reads faces for emotional cues could be applied on a mass scale to better understand the general mood of entire populations, even whole nations.
Google’s chairman recently warned a British audience that the Web will remain vulnerable to cyber attacks for the next ten years. Education is essential to maintaining a free and open Internet.
However hard most political leaders try, almost whatever they do in an attempt to look fashionable and plugged into the real lives of voters, it never seems to quite work. […]
Thus did the Economistcharacterize the dynamic between China and India, arguing that how they “manage their own relationship will determine whether similar mistakes to those that scarred the 20th century […]
I’d like to add to the recent wave of eulogies in honor of Paul Fussell, poetry and culture critic, veteran of the Second World War and author of a classic […]
In response to a lot of feedback on yesterday’s post, the loudest and nastiest of which came from people who deny climate change, I have revised the essay to […]
I was raised to honor our military. One of my grandfathers was a Marine sergeant during World War II. The other was an Army lifer who served in three wars […]
It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also the bright thing to do, says former IOSCO chair Jane Diplock.
For Washington, DC readers, Politics & Prose will be hosting a book event Sunday, June 10 at 1pm relevant to many of the themes discussed at this blog. Details below. America the […]
A little science-fiction philosophy to provoke you to remember on Memorial Day, courtesy of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit: Suppose you were given the chance to teleport yourself, Star Trek style, […]
Never before in our nation’s history have we faced such a monumental decision. The stakes are enormous: the next President will not only be dealing with a possible recession but […]
Nation building is an “in and out” state of mind that is believed to create success with limited spending. Cultivating will take time, but has the potential to create honest dialogues among the U.S. and the other countries that would lead to missions being better carried out.
Ironically, America as a nation seems to have forgotten exactly what Memorial Day is about. Barbeques, all-day sales, the “official” start of summer—all of these threaten to crowd out the […]
The human “capacity for culture” and globalization have the potential to turn us into one culture. With the growing desire to learn about different cultures and the increasing want to travel around the world—it is like “we are machines capable of greater cooperation, inventiveness and common good on Earth.”
The federal government is asking automakers to stop creating in-car devices that can distract drivers from the road. Auto companies such as Audi, Cadillac, Nissan and Ford are among the many that have been including electronic devices with features for drivers to play around with, and now Facebook and Twitter are accessible features.