Steve Chapman sees the Supreme Court’s recent decision to ban life sentences for minors as a much needed compromise between conservative and liberal views of the Constitution.
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“Researchers at UC Berkeley are perfecting microscopic fibers that can produce electricity from simple body motions such as bending, stretching and twisting,” reports the L.A. Times.
People who deny generally accepted scientific truths use fragile reasoning to regain control over their lives from an indifferent Nature, such as claiming that business created swine flu.
Mark Levine of UC Irvine laments Obama’s pragmatic path where his empty promises to change America’s foreign and energy policies mark the way.
The number of marriages where women earn more than men is on the rise according to the Pew Research Center due to the recession and educational opportunities available to women.
Alison Kilkenny at True/Slant documents recent cases of domestic terrorism that have been ignored by media outlets in their search for more sensational stories.
New York psychotherapist Charley Wininger recalls that “hippidom (at its best) was an alternative to this dillusional pathology of separation that has been forced upon us.”
The argument that “we take the internet for granted” may seem like a tired straw man. But perhaps the ideology of the internet could stand a second look. Maybe we […]
Lionel Tiger, the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, is no stranger to controversy. He has made a career out of “telling it like he sees it” when […]
The results from yesterday’s “Little Tuesday” collection of primaries and special elections around the country are in. They were bad news for many established political figures. But they may nevertheless […]
There’s hardly a feat of industrial design more emblematic of consumerism than the vending machine. But while vending machines may perpetuate a number of social ills – from conspiculous consumption […]
2010 marks the 40th anniversary of the Boston Women’s Health Collective, also known as “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” Executive Director Judy Norsigian sat down with Big Think to talk about the […]
On the heels of the untimely passing of heavy metal legend Ronnie James Dio, it’s worth analyzing the social and political force of Dio and his hard-rocking brethren. Dio’s work […]
Despite colloquial wisdom that social networking sites deprive teenagers of contact with the real world, new research shows that users are quite well adjusted.
Moral dogmatism is the true enemy of free thought, says Jonah Goldberg, not ideology; attention to the facts must supersede commitment to a scripted morality.
“The Arab world today is ruled by contradiction,” writes David Ottaway; extreme wealth surrounded by crushing poverty will determine the culture’s future.
Great sex, a commitment to children and lots of together time are three rules of a good marriage that are made to be broken say two marriage experts at Psychology Today.
The blank slate of pop music welcomes entertainers flashy, materialistic and audacious enough to sing endlessly without really singing about anything; pop music, thy name is Ga Ga.
Researchers are using social networking sites to map the spread of flu symptoms between friends, a technique which may one day aid greatly in stemming a public epidemic.
The divide in American ideology between rugged individualism and collective responsibility can be bridged by devolving powers to local communities, says Matthew Dowd for The CSM.
“Reminiscence—not forgetting—faces extinction in a digital age that prioritizes the present over even the recent past,” writes Evgeny Morozov for the Boston Review.
From Paper Monument, British culture is observed by an American writer as a reflection of his own; in both cases he sees a cultural facade papering over Empires fallen and falling.
Clarence Page sees a “radical individualism” that binds the TEA Party and the cultural revolution of the ’60s, but finds practical solutions more lacking in the former.
It’s amazing to think that the work of a groundbreaking photographer such as Henri Cartier-Bresson could once be found on the coffee tables of middle class homes accross America, and […]
Given the exploding coal mines in West Virginia, apocalyptic oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, and the volcanic ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull glacier that stranded millions of people […]
When I was a child and decided to become a physicist, I never dreamed that I would be traveling all over the world with a TV film crew, or lecturing […]
There is a palpable sense of relief amongst many in the Labour Party that Gordon Brown finally acknowledged the inevitable and stood down, after it became apparent that there could […]
What does the Tea Party Movement in the U.S. have in common with the right-wing backlash against immigrants in Europe? Bard College professor Ian Buruma says they are both part […]
When Mario Lavandeira, a.k.a. Perez Hilton, started his blog PageSixSixSix.com in 2004, he says he imagined that maybe a few of his friends would read his musings on tabloid gossip […]
Chess makes for strange bed fellows. Last night at a party at the Trump SoHo hotel in downtown Manhattan, two former world chess champions, Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov, put […]