A brief update while I’m out of town … If Japan didn’t need more geologic (and man-made) disaster, it now appears that the Shinmoedake cone at Kirishima has started erupting […]
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I’ve gotten a couple of very thoughtful emails about my dissing the idea of practical altruism, including a very long one. Basically: They’re accusing of me of being a KANTIAN! […]
India has overtaken China to become the world’s largest importer of weapons, according to a Swedish think-tank that monitors global arms sales. Russia remains its biggest supplier.
Protesters and police clash in Bahrain as a main road is blocked in the capital. Yemeni security forces attack a huge sit-in; live ammunition is fired. Oman’s sultan grants limited power to the state council.
Ivory Coast’s commercial capital Abidjan is descending into a violence as a weakened president is making way for violence against native men and women, U.N. peacekeepers and foreign journalists.
Latin America is experiencing an exceptional boom, owing to soaring income from exports of natural resources. But is the region making the most of this opportunity to use the funds effectively?
During the Clinton years, it would have been easy to secure support for intervention in Libya, but now N.A.T.O. appears timid over the issue of humanitarian intervention. What happened?
The U.S. and U.K. expressed support for the Arab League’s approval of a no-fly zone as Libyan rebels beat a hasty eastward retreat, but is the council’s action too little, too late?
Israel said that it would build hundreds of new housing units within the populous West Bank settlement blocs, ending a slowdown in government-supported construction that had lasted several months.
As Gaddafi hangs on to his military might, rebel forces have abandoned the town of Brega leaving open the road to Bengazi—the last major rebel outpost in the anti-Gaddafi east.
Leading author on democracy promotion and democratization, Thomas Carothers debunks the myths surrounding the Arab world’s new governments—and wonders what role the West should play.
Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the country was suffering its worst crisis since World War II. The death toll could exceed 10,000 in one district alone, police warned.
Let’s dream for a minute. What if we lived in a world in which students and educators… had access to all of the information in their textbooks – and an […]
If I wasn’t out of town, helping our peripatetic college student move out of her dorm at the end of the quarter, I would probably be going to a video […]
According to some Republicans from New Hampshire, the answer to this question is yes.
Information about Japan’s failing nuclear reactors is being leak slowly, with few confirmed reports as to the real status, but here’s what we know so far as of the end of the weekend.
So I know you’ve missed me: Well, I’ve been busy hearing about various scientific accounts of virtue at the meeting of the recipients of the University of Chicago Science of […]
When people discuss “rationality” they can mean any of five different concepts.
If futurists like Ray Kurzweil are correct about the accelerating pace of technological breakthrough, it is only a matter of time until we augment our brains with machine components.
Could a genetic disorder and a rare blood type explain Henry VIII’s health problems, his wives’ miscarriages, and even his madness? New findings shed light on England’s most infamous king.
A new study of a common etiquette—holding a door for someone—suggests that courtesy may have a more practical, though unconscious, shared motivation: to reduce the work for those involved.
Like schools of fish that respond to predators, we need to rely on our unconscious impulses because, by and large, it makes us smarter and quicker, says psychoanalyst Ken Eisold.
More than any other Eastern thinker in the 20th century, Suzuki catalyzed the rise of humanistic psychology, which has spurred today’s interest in spirituality and well-being.
States desperate to cut costs during the recession have slashed non-Medicaid spending for mental health care by more than $1.8 billion since 2009, diminishing necessary services for the mentally ill.
Our culture once depended on the memorization and recitation of long-form narratives like stories and poems. What does it mean that we are losing our capacity to recall our own culture?
A study from the University of Toronto has found that the more a woman’s job encroaches on her family life, the more guilty she feels—and interprets the guilt as personal failure.
Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, thinks the answer is definitely yes.
Disaster survivors in Japan must not only deal with physical trauma from earthquakes and tsunamis, but with psychological distress that can strike immediately, soon after or long after the event.
We’ve all been floored by the footage and information about the Mw8.9 earthquake in Japan (video) and the tsunami that followed. Some of the footage is stunning – like nothing I’ve […]
It says something about the rather dismal condition of both British politics and journalism, that this week there was an amount of liberal fluttering over a speech at the London […]