All Articles

Great Big Ideas, the first Floating University course, features twelve of the most important thinkers and practitioners in their fields. These lecturers are constantly making news, and in this blog, […]

The big issue for reporters, editors, and publishers isn’t automated text generation. It’s the explosion of free human-authored content on the Web.

Great for consumers, bad for authors? As Amazon prepares to launch its long-rumored Android-powered tablet, it is also reportedly thinking about an e-book rental service.

Digital fitness–the ability to adapt to changes in the digital environment—is lacking in the PR sector though it was an early adopter of social media. Time to rethink traditional PR tactics.

Guest Post by Jenna Le. Jenna Le has worked as a physician in Queens and the Bronx, New York City. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Six Rivers, was published by New York […]

We have argued for decades that we are running out of space for our garbage in the thousands of landfills currently peppering the globe… Now we are faced with another […]

A body of running water may be called any of many different names, the most generic being stream, the most common being river.  A river can be defined as ‘a […]

While some inventions will remain forever confined to the pages of science fiction novels, much of what we’ve dreamed up in books – warp drive, star gates, portals through space and time – will one day make the leap in to living rooms everywhere.

It has been awhile since I’ve talked about the volcanoes of Colombia – they’ve had a fairly quiet year, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is going on. If you […]

My friend Bryan Caplan, the iconoclastic George Mason economist (redundant?), has long waged jihad against the “self-interested voter hypothesis,” which is the hypothesis that voters prefer and vote for policies […]

Thanks to huge loans from the Chinese Government, solar manufacturing has shifted from being led by a geographically disperse group to one dominated by Chinese companies.

Dream of bashing in Michelle Bachmann’s ferocious grin? Ripping open the capacious gut of Gingrich? Frying that execution-lovin’ Rick Perry? Dissecting Mitt Romney to see if he’s as weird on […]

“I define an expert as someone who can tell you exactly how something can’t be done,” says X Prize founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis. 

So obviously the division of human inquiry into the sciences and the humanities is ridiculous.  Reality, after all, is one. The opinion of scientists tends to be that they’re all […]

The financial crisis and its excesses have spurned alternative banking initiatives. One of them is ethical banking, which stands for total transparency and invests only in the real economy.

When we remember, what is it that we’re remembering? Do we try to recapture the appearance of a moment, like a photograph or a postcard that shows us a perfect […]

The rest of the euro zone is losing patience with Greece. Germany is even working on scenarios exploring what would happen if Greece left the euro zone.

In what some see as the opposite of globalization, many Gulf countries have been investing in foreign farmland, mainly in fertile Africa, to serve as their bread basket.

U.S. Government attempts to drive up the price of medicine in developing countries, as described in leaked cables, amounts to state-sponsored violence, writes James Love.

“Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend”                                                     […]

Rather than wringing their hands over young people’s fecklessness, educators, politicians, CEOs, and other leaders of this rising generation must learn to engage its need for a higher purpose by setting lofty and meaningful goals

I’m not happy at work. That is what more and more workers around the world are saying today. In fact, according to a new survey, between 28% and 56% of […]

I spent today, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, at a party—my niece’s ninth birthday party. Her birthday is 9/9, but there was a chance that she would have been born […]

It simply beggars belief that there are some in the British media who still take the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, even vaguely seriously. On Friday, we were treated […]

On Thursday, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, proposing a new $450 billion bill designed to create jobs. With unemployment still over 9%, Obama’s reelection chances may hinge […]

Welcome to the club. Let’s begin with the name, which is swiped from the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, a philosophy discussion group founded in 1878 for Cambridge men who were doing […]

I thought I’d have one more 9/11 post—this time on 9/11. I’ve gotten a couple of emails accusing me of hating Muslims.  Well, I don’t.  I’m, of course, also aware […]

A recently published study has shed light on the memory-altering effects of one of the most widely used hormone-regulating drugs in the world: the birth control pill.  

The attacks of 9/11 changed not only how we engage with the world but what we know about it. In the last ten years, psychology has advanced in its understanding of trauma and resiliency.  

For decades, psychologists have thought that traumatic events become imprinted into the brain. But studies have shown that these memories are not as accurate as we may believe them to be.