All Articles

Most atheist writers in America have encountered the phenomenon of “fatwa envy“, where Christian apologists sneer that we wouldn’t dare criticize Islam in the same way we criticize Christianity. (This […]

My latest article has been posted on AlterNet, How We All Pay For the Huge Tax Privileges Granted to Religion — It’s Time to Tax the Church. In it, I […]

In a watershed moment for chimpanzee research, the US Institute of Medicine says “most current use of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary.”

A recent two-year trial of telehealth technology for monitoring people who are chronically ill found it works particularly well for people with conditions like diabetes and heart failure.

There is no question that in many cases, we are cancer phobic, more afraid of the disease than the medical evidence says we need to be, and that fear alone can be bad for our health.

ABA, a time-intensive autism treatment called applied behavior analysis, has wide support and is now a profitable business. But the jury is still out on its effectiveness.

Christopher Hitchens and Steve Jobs were among the first patients to benefit from very new technology using DNA sequencing to pick the cancer drugs likely to be most effective. 

Telling people how much exercise they’d need to do to burn up the calories in junk food is a much more effective deterrent than telling them the calorie count, researchers have found.

Christopher Hitchens has died. I never personally met the man, but I want to say a few words in tribute. Of all the popular figures commonly styled as the New […]

Imagine you’re an expert on some famous artist. Now imagine someone comes to you with a painting they believe is by that famous artist. After looking at the painting, you […]

The fierce moralist and political writer has died of oesophageal cancer and the outpouring of remorse at his loss is as varied as the arguments he made during his life. A fond farewell, Hitch.

Washington political analyst and author of Primary Colors, Joe Klein is back with his yearly awards for courageous politicians. Some you’ve heard of, some you probably haven’t.

America needs to make the dollars it spends on higher education work more efficiently.

As soon as 2025, large parts of the world could experience perrennial water shortages, says Dr. Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center and a leading expert on hydroclimatology, climate change adaptation, and risk analysis.

Throughout the day, Zynga has been trading at or bellow its initial stock offering. While Zynga will still cash in, is its proportional success a sign that the tech bubble is shrinking?

Since, at its heart, Occupy Wall Street is a conversation about values that is leading to direct action — a beta test for a better society — people should not despair that it is a “leaderless movement.”

Eric Sanders, an active participant in Occupy Wall Street, offers advice to protesters for maintaining peaceful relations with the police.

When her product idea became an unexpected success, Victoria Ransom had to expand quickly. She was aware that choosing the right people would make all the difference down the line.

ACLU President Susan Herman outlines how you can legally and properly exercise your Constitutional rights when you are stopped by the police. 

Get in to the holiday spirit by listening to Robert Pinsky read Dante’s Paradiso.

A group of entrepreneurs led by PayPal founder Peter Thiel are hoping to circumvent U.S. visa restrictions by floating a business incubator on a ship anchored 12 miles off the coast of California.

Following up on our study analyzing the shifting roles and emerging practices of science journalists in the digital age, Declan Fahy contributed a valuable discussion to the news site of […]

I wanted to highlight this excellent post on JT’s blog about the rewards of activism: Joe was sick in the hospital, and asked a friend of his to go down […]

In a rut? Instead of changing what you do, try changing how you think about it, says Roger Martin, a strategic advisor to global businesses and Dean of the Rotman School of Management. 

A digital scrapbook of your entire life. That’s what Facebook is releasing with its newest product Timeline. But in telling the story of your life, you may want to do some editing.

I was reading a trade publication about industry forecasts for bathroom fixture trends some time ago (don’t ask). “Large bathrooms are in,” the experts said. It’s true. American bathrooms have […]

Fusion energy expert Marcin Jakubowski has begun an open sourced hardware project that allows individuals to create their own simple tools to build stronger, more sustainable communities.

In his Floating University lecture, Dr. Nicholas Christakis explains why individual actions are inextricably linked to sociological pressures.

A forum where top mixologists explore the party drinks defining the 21st Century.  

Here is a post for commenters who like to write, “Repeat after me people, correlation does not imply causality!” whenever they read an empirical result they do not want to […]