There are predictions that, like Latin before it, English must inevitably lose its global dominance. The Guardian’s Robert McCrum is not convinced.
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Everyone yawns, but no one knows why. We start when we are in the womb, and we do it through old age, but the purpose and survival value of yawning remain a mystery.
The three most important questions for a nationwide broadband network are: What should the speed be? What will it cost? And how will we pay for it? Craig Settles gives some answers.
Investors’ giddiness over the tech upstarts—and the dozens of other Chinese companies that have gone public in the U.S.—has some wondering whether this boom is really a bubble.
How can we trust a literary guide who, ignorant of the terrain ahead, promises us it will be light and easy? Hillary Kelly objects to Oprah’s positivity charged book club.
Our cosmos was “bruised” in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background.
The amiable idea that language shapes thought has become disconnected, in our popular culture, from any consideration of mere fact, says Mark Liberman of the U of Pennsylvania.
Can modern science help us to create heroes? That’s the lofty question behind the Heroic Imagination Project, a new nonprofit started by Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo.
Obesity is a growing global health problem, and we all know why, don’t we? It’s the fault of corporations that sell corn syrup, and a starkly unequal society (why would […]
A California judge signed off on Festivus as a legit religion: Locked up in a California jail, Malcolm Alarmo King wanted healthier meals. In an argument apparently made to a […]
Who won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2006? Whoever it was, it should have been Julian Assange for this self-description: Thu 29 Jun 2006 : Krill to the […]
War-torn Afghanistan has a long path to healing ahead, but one nonprofit, Business Council for Peace, is quietly pushing things along with a smart social enterprise that trains Afghan women […]
Chances are you have probably never heard of the stem cell tourism industry. This nascent yet growing industry consists of clinics and practitioners in China, Mexico, and Germany who promote […]
Recently, I had the rare opportunity to be on both The Colbert Report and the Conan show. As you can imagine, we had a madcap, hilarious romp through time travel, […]
A shortcoming of Lockean liberalism, the kind of liberty to which the Founders were primarily devoted, is its tendency to undermine the stability of the family over time. As the nation’s […]
Terrorism is not so much a military strategy as a public relations strategy. The aim of terrorists is not to defeat their enemies militarily, but to provoke some kind of […]
So here’s a contribution to a symposium on our president that I wrote in the form of advice. An excerpt follows: Maybe our president can fend off creeping Tea-Partyism only by […]
Innovation is built into the American way of life, says former President Jimmy Carter. “Quite often, the people who do leave their own nation and come to an unknown destination, […]
The CFR Asia studies director lists the top thought leaders driving the country forward.
Even when you control for cultural differences, lesbians in the workplace still make significantly more money, on average, than heterosexual women.
What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two, perhaps caught between principle and pragmatism.
Ices stripped off a long-lost moon may have provided the raw materials for Saturn’s rings and inner satellites before the Titan-twin slammed into its mother planet, new research shows.
The U.S. is anxious to broaden its influence in Central Asia—and limit that of Russia. The result, however, are questionable alliances with some of the strangest despots in the world.
If we continue on our current path of unbridled consumerism and environmental destruction, the most likely future scenario is one in which the quality of human lives is relatively low.
Gone are the days when classical artists could offer performances of Mozart and simply expect people to show up. Orchestras and presenters must be more entrepreneurial, more risk-ready.
There are plenty of places on Earth that seem alien to us. The deep sea is a perfect example: it’s been said that we know more about Mars than we do about the bottom of the ocean.
Exploring open relationships can change our assumptions about intimacy and empowerment, and give excitement to a world otherwise determined by the limits of the present culture.
For thousands of years aspirin has been humanity’s wonder drug. Taking it for five to ten years easily beats initiatives to screen for breast and prostate cancers, says The Economist.
Are iPhones and Blackberries becoming extensions of our thinking selves? Andy Clark says they are a kind of cognitive prosthetic that fits the niche of our biological brains.
Whatever one’s views on the initial case for making drugs illegal, the cost has been tremendous, and in many aspects unanticipated, says Nobel Laureate Gary Becker.