Not a lot of time today for a substantive post, but seems like a good day for a new Mystery Volcano Photo. We’re into the third decade of photos, so […]
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MIT ethnographer Sherry Turkle warns of the dangers of social technology after herself experiencing what was like a schoolgirl crush on a human-looking machine.
Scientists have come a step closer to gaining complete control over a mind, even if that mind belongs to a creature the size of a grain of sand.
As soon as we start saying our lives or our planet from a cosmic perspective is meaningless, we are no longer engaged in science but science-fiction.
In the aftermath of the (Tucson shootings), something has changed. No one can say how long the calm will endure. When it fades, perhaps the memory will leave us all in a better place.
Europe is in deep crisis — because its proudest achievement, the single currency adopted by most European nations, is now in danger.
Ross Douthat argues that the press and Palin have been at war with each other almost from the first, but their mutual antipathy looks increasingly like co-dependency.
The fall of the Tunisian president Ben Ali played out for all the world on Twitter, some dubbing it a “Twitter Revolution” like the election protests in Iran and Moldovia.
Internet debate can be coarse, but it is holding journalists and politicians to account, writes Boris Johnson. What are we going to do about the lawyers, he asks.
A new film explores how globalization has resulted in crises of the economy, the environment and the human spirit — and points the way to a new path.
Faced with a public health crisis, Portugal decriminalized the possession of all illicit drugs. Nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that its great drug experiment may have worked.
It’s been a tough week in Georgia, with heavy snowfall last weekend that paralyzed the northern half of the state. Now businesses are playing catch up. The mail is being […]
The shootings in Tucson, Arizona appear to have had a truly cathartic effect in the United States. It is almost as though the random actions of a mad man have […]
Last week, I was sharply critical of the way Sarah Palin handled accusations that she was in some way to blame for the Tucson shooting. It is easy to understand […]
Yes, a rare Sunday post, mostly because I’m not sure I’ll have a time tomorrow morning for a post as it will be the first day of the new semester […]
Forget that old tagline about the Internet being an information “superhighway”. The online world is an information battlefield with pranksters and pragmatists struggling to be heard.
Mysticism has no past, no genealogy, and yet it walks and knows why. How do we account for the religious imagination in the U.S. while Europe grows more and more skeptical?
Prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs have more than doubled in the U.S. over the past 15 years, often given for conditions for which there is scant evidence they work.
The shortage of web addresses is “not a crisis but getting more urgent”, say analysts. The web is running out of addresses and IPv6 is the answer.
When future astronomers look to the sky, they will no longer witness the past. Observations will reveal nothing but an endless stretch of inky black stillness.
Today we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on.
Mobile-phone companies across Africa are drawing battle lines to capture the rising middle-class consumer. But in Kenya, the war already is well under way.
Living at a higher altitude may be a risk factor for suicide, a recent study in the journal High Altitude Medicine & Biology has found. The study may help develop new treatments.
Millenniums of bare subsistence have given way to two centuries of luxury. Crass middle-class values are what made the modern world, and we ignore them at our peril.
Mainstream economists are preaching a decade of pain and historically high joblessness as if no alternative policy existed. Dean Baker thinks pessimism has run rampant.
New York taxis are known for lots of things, most of them bad. Thanks to a new advertising campaign, 500 Big Apple taxis will be known for something great—great art. […]
Most of you won’t believe this, but I’ve actually gotten several requests to say more about Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, rightly called the best book ever written on […]
There’s no reason why education environments in the developing world shouldn’t be as elegant and functional as those in the developed. At least that’s the premise at the heart of […]
Former New York commodities trader Vincent McCrudden was charged in federal court this week with threatening to kill 47 current and former federal regulators from the Securities and Exchange Commission […]
Wikipedia turned 10 years old this week, and perhaps no entry better captures its chaotic ascendency than that of Jesus Christ.