Vice President Biden predicts that this, at long last, will be “the summer of recovery.” The stimulus bill is working, he said, and “more people are going to be put […]
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Last night I met with an old friend in Central London, who used to be a journalist and who now works for a large, international company which makes good use […]
David Brooks and Gail Collins take on New and Old Media in their ongoing conversation at the New York Times. The career journalists think beat reporting is still crucial to worthwhile journalism.
Steve Chapman at The Chicago Tribune asks if gun regulation, following the Supreme Court’s move to strike down Chicago’s handgun ban, is like using a garden hose to defeat a forest fire.
Soccer’s peculiar resemblances to socialism is why America has yet to really succeed at the sport, says The Guardian’s American-in-Residence, Michael Tomansky.
While genes and lifestyle play their respective role in the aging process, deeper research further delineates between the two. Living past 100 may be in the genes, says Scientific American.
“Boys’ voices are breaking earlier; girls are developing breasts as young as six. But why?” Danish researchers began investigating when a church choir could not find enough pre-pubescent boys.
“Blood drawn with a simple needle stick can be coaxed into producing stem cells that may have the ability to form any type of tissue in the body.” This according to three new studies.
The idea that espionage always relies on cutting-edge technology is a myth, says The Christian Science Monitor, which divulges the five oldest, and still most effective, spy tricks.
The USDA is addressing the American health epidemic: “For the first time ever, our official dietary guidelines might address access to healthy food for poor people,” says Salon.
Martha Nussbaum says that when the President and politicians publicly admire the education systems of China and Singapore, they support learning systems at odds with an open society.
New research suggests that reciting maxims to one’s self, such as “Everyone makes mistakes,” can help the ego recover from guilt associated with acting against one’s principles.
Every year, millions of women and children across Southeast Asia are being enslaved and exploited in the multimillion-dollar human trafficking industry. This is one of the largest-scale human rights violations […]
If you are a Star Trek fan, you may long have been fascinated by the idea of a “replicator”; a device where you simply ask for something and the device […]
We need poetry in our lives. It is not a luxury. It is not only for an elite. And it does something that no other art form can do, even […]
Legal scholar Laurence Tribe told Big Think today that he found Elena Kagan’s performance in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings to be “masterful in every respect.” Kagan, who was previously the […]
Johanna Sigurdardottir, Iceland’s prime minister, just got married. That in itself might not be particularly noteworthy, except for one thing—she married a woman. When Johanna was elected in 2009, she […]
“I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a creator.” As soon as I heard these words from Stephen Hayes through the phone, I sat back in my chair. […]
Researchers have demonstrated that “the neural circuitry that controls the sleep/wake cycle in humans may also control the sleep patterns of 17 different mammalian species.
“It seems fair to conclude that the 81-year-old, Canadian-born [Frank] Gehry is the most important architect of our age,” writes Matt Tyrnauer.
“In all Nabokov’s work, the kindliness of memory recreates Eden, just as perversity razes it to the ground,” writes Lesley Chamberlain. “We can lose our capacity to interpret the world as good. We can see only darkness.”
Imaging technology has now been used to assemble the first comprehensive map of global soil moisture that covers all land areas of the world, except for frozen soils at high latitudes and in some mountain regions.
Theodore Dalrymple is not sure that snobbery is actually a vice. “Everyone needs someone to look down on, and the psychological need is the more urgent the more meritocratic a society becomes,” he writes.
A new survey finds that while people around the world firmly support equal rights for men and women, many believe men should still get preference in jobs and education.
“Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism,” writes Ron Rosenbaum. “Agnosticism is … opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.”
A new concept aircraft from Lockheed Martin could pave the way for supersonic flights over land by shushing the sonic booms created by the planes.
“What would you get if you crossed a whale with a shark?” asks Sid Perkins. “Maybe something like Leviathan melvillei, a long-extinct, hypercarnivorous whale with teeth longer than any T. rex ever had.”
Edward Tenner wonders whether business models, like major engineering projects and government agencies, have their own failure timetables.
Opening my daily Treehugger news email just now, I noticed that headline: ‘Dinner in the Dumpster’. Oh, I thought, how fun! An article about freeganism! In fact, the article at […]