There is no single part of the human brain that gives it advanced language capabilities. Rather, humans rely on multiple parts of the brain to extract meaning from sentences.
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Some believe we should move a system where health insurers pay a fixed, up-front cost for each particular health problem—and let the hospital and caregivers use the money as they see fit.
“The May 1 riots in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district have become an annual ritual. … Now an American anti-capitalist activist has started giving tours of the neighborhood’s hot spots to foreign visitors.”
“The term ‘slow travel’ is tied to a burgeoning movement to return to a time when life’s pleasures were savored, to a time when people appreciated the going as much as the getting there,” writes Nancy Keates.
“What’s the difference between a frog, a chicken, a mouse and a human? Not as much as you’d think, according to an analysis of the first sequenced amphibian genome.”
La Santa Muerte, Holy Death, “is only one among several otherworldly figures Mexicans have been turning to as their country has been overwhelmed by every possible difficulty.”
Paul Krugman writes that the Greek crisis demonstrates the dangers of nations putting themselves in a “policy straitjacket.”
On Monday, Republicans voted to prevent financial reform legislation from moving to the Senate floor for debate. The Democrats’ motion to bring about cloture—which would end the Republicans filibuster of […]
Around the turn of the 20th century, if you were in the upper class in America, you’d have probably, at some point, sat down to a nice dinner of Diamond […]
Why don’t people notice that Apple has no qualms pressuring the police to barge into the homes of journalists? Or that we are now automatically signed on with our Facebook ID on 50,000 websites, all of which have added this functionality just in the last week? No, we are too busy standing in line for hours to buy the iPad or checking if our Facebook friends like Lady Gaga as much as we do to take stock of what’s really happening behind the curtains.
Here’s what’s great about Janet Malcolm’s piece this week about the murder trial of Mazultov Borukhova and Mikhail Mallayev in The New Yorker: It captures a truth about trials that […]
Rachel Maddow discusses the snowballing campaign to boycott the State of Arizona over its radical new racial profiling law. The law, which takes effect this summer, would allow a police […]
Faulkner would sacrifice his grandmother for his fiction—Anne Lamott, however, would not. For writers who, like most of us, have the goods on their family and friends, “honest can be […]
Big Think’s Peter Hopkins will interview journalist and tech entrepreneur John Battelle in Mountain View, California this afternoon for the HP-sponsored webcast “New Marketing in the New Normal.” Battelle, the […]
After months of struggling with unending debt, the time has come for Germany to step in and help Greece. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, was less than happy about […]
I’m just getting on a flight from Medellín, Colombia. No, I wasn’t hanging out with drug lords, war lords, or Nazis who fled Germany after World War II. I was […]
I was tooling around the internet for awhile yesterday, looking for a transcript of the Congressional hearings that featured Goldman Sachs executives and traders as the star witnesses, before I […]
A recent study of multiple sclerosis has found no genetic dissimilarities between identical twins who have and don’t have the disease.
Tim Logan writes that the trouble with talent attraction as an economic development strategy is that talent seeks opportunity—and without jobs, a “creative class” city will wither.
“Even if all computerized route maps eventually learn to mimic the most useful aspects of our homemade creations, we’ll keep drawing maps for one another and for ourselves,” writes Julia Turner.
“Americans must be willing to show a greater appreciation for the things government rightly does on our behalf and have an honest discussion about how to pay for them,” writes Dennis Jett.
James Bridle writes that publishers need to look beyond one-size-fits-all definitions of their product, and take a long look at where and how people are reading.
Two teams of researchers have confirmed that an asteroid circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter has water ice and organic compounds.
Elizabeth Chang writes that Barack Obama shouldn’t have checked “African American” on his census form because he is biracial.
Experts believe that New York City is home to as many as 800 languages, many of which are heard more commonly in the five boroughs than anywhere else.
New research indicates that superstition may be able to influence the outcome of event. Study subjects who were told they were playing with a “lucky” golf ball, on average, sank more putts.
Naomi Klein’s 2000 book “No Logo” inadvertently served as the most influential marketing manual of the decade, writes Andrew Potter.
The Los Angeles Times began placing ads within its editorial stories this week; they couldn’t have come up with a more misguided or damaging effort to bring in revenue if […]
Magazine covers are “a wasteland of creativity” these days. Or so says legendary advertising and design guru George Lois. “Go to a newsstand today, there’s not a memorable—forget about something […]
If David Cameron wants to beat Gordon Brown next month, he might want to play a lot of tennis. According to this paper, anyway, gestures and small movements are enough […]