All Articles

Nation building is an “in and out” state of mind that is believed to create success with limited spending. Cultivating will take time, but has the potential to create honest dialogues among the U.S. and the other countries that would lead to missions being better carried out.

Ironically, America as a nation seems to have forgotten exactly what Memorial Day is about. Barbeques, all-day sales, the “official” start of summer—all of these threaten to crowd out the […]

The human “capacity for culture” and globalization have the potential to turn us into one culture. With the growing desire to learn about different cultures and the increasing want to travel around the world—it is like “we are machines capable of greater cooperation, inventiveness and common good on Earth.”

The federal government is asking automakers to stop creating in-car devices that can distract drivers from the road. Auto companies such as Audi, Cadillac, Nissan and Ford are among the many that have been including electronic devices with features for drivers to play around with, and now Facebook and Twitter are accessible features.

The Department of Defense and researchers have collected and compiled the data on combat trauma and suicide. On Memorial Day people remember soldiers that paid the price for freedom, yet less than ten percent died on the battlefield. 

A report based on income, housing and life satisfaction to determine the happiest countries in the world, indicates that what makes people truly happy is hard to pinpoint. 

Noah Millman intervenes sensibly in the great Douthat–Sanchez debate about morality and religion: Okay, so humanists don’t have strong reasons for their faith in human rights. Do Christians have strong […]

This blog was originally posted on Law Think. MON 21/5/2012 Immigration: House of Commons A brief discussion was had concerning immigration and Article 8. New immigration rules will be in […]

Some men–those who lack empathy and warmth–are better than others when it comes to picking up on visual cues that flag women as more willing to engage in casual sex. 

The modernist concept of a fragmentary and ephemeral self, like that put forward by Virginia Wolf, is false, says psychologist Bruce Hood. He argues that the self does not exist at all.

Following research on how humans express emotion through facial expressions, MIT scientists have created new computer software that understands human emotion better than we do. 

For decades, the world’s most prolific scientists have relied on the American college undergraduate to represent humanity. Not surprisingly, they may not be very representative. 

A recent study at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine has found that, partly as a result of their genes, centenarians are commonly outgoing, optimistic and easygoing people. 

There are editors (the initial and final gatekeepers) who are not catching (or do not care about) these blatant displays of academic dishonesty.

I agree with the sagacious Carl Scott that the conservative bloggers have gone too far in their attacks on our president’s Occidental professor Roger Boesche. Obama called Boesche his favorite professor at Occidental, and he […]

Americans don’t drive as much as they used to. The Department of Transportation estimates that Americans drove 2.9 trillion miles in the year from April 2011 to March 2012. That’s […]

Yesterday, as we finished recapping our respective workdays over a glass of wine, S. asked me if I’d seen the story  on the web about the Melungeon people who had […]

My latest column has been posted on AlterNet, 9 Great Freethinkers and Religious Dissenters in History. Based on my series “The Contributions of Freethinkers“, it’s a listing of some famous […]

Studies reveal self-talk is one of the healthiest exercises for the brain. Something commonly linked with being crazy is very sane, and should be a part of our daily lives.

Two weeks ago, the happiest place on earth got a whole lot happier. Tokyo Disneyland, in a move that surprised and delighted thousands across Asia, announced their support of gay […]

This essay was previously published on AlterNet. In the summer of 2010, I saw him several times a week: a portly, dark-skinned gentleman, leaning against a pillar in Penn Station […]

This article was previously published on AlterNet. For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became […]

In his interesting review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind last month, the philosopher John Gray makes an important point about evolution-based attempts to account for human morality. To explain […]

Richard Marshall of 3:AM interviews the philosopher Eddie Nahmias about his work on free will. Everyone who would prefer not to be trapped in a thicket of confusion about free […]

The rights of prison inmates are meticulously defined by law while nursing home standards vary widely. Not to mention prison is free and healthcare is provided at a relatively high level. 

Big Think’s own founder and president Peter Hopkins gave Rahim Kanani at Forbes some face time in preparation for the 2012 Social Innovation Summit taking place next week at the United Nations Headquarters in […]

By mourning celebrity deaths online, we seek to display our specialness by association, say psychologists. The act also performs the important social function of building solidarity. 

In the 17th century, the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes famously argued that, “the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” With this move, Descartes […]

Without feeling like the victim of my own lust, I experienced freedom for the first time in my life. 

Katie Hinde is the Director of the Comparative Lactation Laboratory at Harvard University. Her research examines mother’s milk and how it contributes to infant development in humans and primates–including behavior, cognition and the brain.  Here, she discusses the effects of breast milk on behavior, what she thinks human mothers should know and the recent (and controversial) Time magazine breastfeeding cover.