China is tobacco’s biggest stronghold. After years of working in vain, anti-smoking activists are trying a new tack in China: using economic rather than health and morality arguments.
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Yet again, Very Serious men at an international organization seem determined to justify tightening monetary policy despite a continuing deep slump. Paul Krugman finds it scary.
Think the U.S. can drill its way out of expensive gas? Think again, says The Atlantic. Derek Thompson explains what goes into the price of gasoline and why is it suddenly rising so fast.
“We are the mediocre presidents. You won’t find our faces on dollars or on cents! There’s Taylor, there’s Tyler, There’s Fillmore and there’s Hayes. There’s William Henry Harrison,” (Harrison:) “I […]
How do we speak and write about things when things are not going the way that we want? Not just little things, like lunch, but big things, like wars. Do […]
Journalist Mark Seddon writes that “Greece should be allowed to de-fault and regain its currency. The Euro zone may shrink in the process, but it would be more realistic for it.”
Huntsman is now the Republican darling of the liberal press. The truth is his speech before the Statue of Liberty (which echoed Reagan in terms of location) was shallow and […]
Smart phones even more than tablets are the perfect all-in-one purpose devices. And as we are using them a bit more every day in a multitude of situations that just […]
A recent study published in Nature examines the neurology behind the tendencies of urban dwellers to develop anxiety and eating disorders at higher rates than their rural brethren.
A shocking discovery in the science of taste indicates that the source of gustatory pleasure comes after we eat food. It seems our guts prefer animal protein despite what we make our diet.
University of Michigan scientists have demonstrated how memory circuits in the brain refine themselves in a living organism through two distinct types of competition between cells.
Mind reading may now be a reality. U.C.L.A. psychologists recently used fMRIs to study whether or not these brain scans could predict how persuasion changes people’s behavior.
When we are confronted with data that contradicts our world view, our brains battle against the information just as they would an attacking predator. Can neuroscience save us?
The sound of children laughing delights listeners more than any other noise, a New Zealand study has found. Psychologist Aaron Jarden says it is because laughter is associated with well-being.
A leading neuroscientist calls into question the concept of volition and the foundations of our legal system—he proposes a new way forward for law and order.
Wednesday evening the bipartisan negotiations on raising the debt ceiling collapsed when House Majority Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced he was pulling out of the talks. Cantor refused to continue the […]
People’s attitudes lag behind their times, as Hermann Broch observed. At the height of the European Enlightenment, philosophers who dreamed of universal rights accepted that men would be broken on […]
Last night, an equal marriage bill passed the New York State Senate and was signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo. New York has become the sixth, and largest, state […]
A new antiviral drug that recently won federal approval to treat hepatitis C can effectively cure most patients of the infectious disease, which has been notoriously difficult to treat.
Nature doesn’t litter, people do. In the US that trash amounts to 1.4 billion pounds per day. And 40% of that is packaging. Recently, Greenpeace tried to provoke the global […]
There is accumulating evidence that cellphones that operate on GSM networks emit significantly more radiation than do cellphones operating on CDMA networks.
In Milwaukee, the fourth-poorest city in America, educators have launched a “guerrilla classroom” initiative that transforms urban locations into impromptu classrooms for parents and children. Across Milwaukee, playgrounds, bus stops […]
Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey wants to reverse the aging process, enabling people to lead long, very long, active lives. He believes immortality is within our grasp.
Counting on food with fake fats to help you lose weight? Better count again because a new study with rats shows that low-calorie fat substitutes can actually promote weight gain.
Now that New York’s state Senate has approved gay marriage, how will the health of the LGBT community be affected? Take the good with the bad, says a Columbia Law School professor.
An inexpensive vaccine normally used against tuberculosis has been found to reverse Type 1 diabetes while dietitians in the U.K. have found an extremely low-calorie diet to reverse Type 2.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recentlywrote that while members of the U.S. armed forces may as a group be politically conservative, “they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos.” Kristof’s […]
We all draw as kids, yet most of us stop drawing somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade. Doodles seem unserious by then, and adulthood only makes us less likely […]
In his recent essay, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” star reporter Jose Antonio Vargas recalls being sent to the U.S. at the age of 12 to live with his […]
The title of Nathan Mhyrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, a 40 lb. compendium of food history and philosophy, is meant to evoke the radicalism of 20th-century artists like Picasso and Pound, whose motto was “make it new.”