Is a Harley Davidson motorcycle a masterpiece? In an effort to buoy the mid-range art market, auction houses are expanding the definition, associating the term with luxury.
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Humans are a distractible bunch. We’re easily seduced by ads and offers, memes and tweets. When we’re not focused on useless gimmicks and irrelevant social chatter our minds drift into […]
Sports psychologists have found that more ardent fans of a sports team form significant and positive social relationships that turn on identifying with the aspirations of the team.
In the avalanche of analysis and speculation about Chief Justice Roberts’ stunning decision to side with the Supreme Court’s liberal wing to uphold Obama’s healthcare law, one strain paints Roberts […]
Who could disagree with self-fulfillment and self-cultivation? These values, however, which are centered on expressive individualism, leave the values of future generations up for grabs.
What’s the Big Idea? Perhaps the better question is, do humans speak dog? Either way, the debate over whether language is unique to humans, or a faculty also possessed by […]
Financial management and youth are like oil and vinegar–they don’t mix. Managing finances is a distant and removed—and thus boring–prospect for most young people. In fact, the very idea of […]
What happens when you do make it to the top of your field, only to find that it’s not exactly what you’d expected or been told to expect?
Imagine yourself in the hotseat at NBC programming. Are you the Industry Leader? The Runaway Train? Or the Sniveling Quail? Take our psychometrically untested personality quiz and find out!
People like us are rare. There is so much pressure to conform, but we are willing to be different. We dare to face down any crowd armed with only what […]
Art history is littered with unsavory biographies but how can works of such exalted inspiration originate in selfish characters? Extreme devotion to any singular purpose may be inhuman.
So the big news in squeaky clean Singapore of late is that this manicured island-state is hardly as bland, boring or as vice-free as it’s been made out to be, […]
Postings at Waq al-waq will be suspended until some point in mid-July (depending on the fish and novels) at which point I will resume, what is for me, regular posting.
Fashion never sleeps apparently, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Asia where lifestyle related online start-ups are springing up faster than you can say “buy me that Birkin.” […]
Today’s breaking news was, of course, that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare”. In what will doubtless go down in American history […]
In slang, the “cheating band” used to mean that conspicuous band of paler skin revealed when a would-be cheater took off their wedding band to fool and seduce a new […]
Whether women, or men, or both invented it – empathy, even in adversarial relationships, is invariably the wisest approach.
In Yemen, al-Qaeda often makes mistakes that open the group up to criticism. Most of the time this chance goes begging as the Yemeni government, popular clerics and tribal shaykhs […]
Who could have predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts would break with the conservative block on the Supreme Court and write the majority opinion upholding the individual mandate, one of […]
Warren Littlefield, former NBC president, advises young people entering any field to trust in their instincts even when they run counter to common sense in the industry, then to fight passionately for the projects and ideas they believe in.
What is the Big Idea? A new study released on Tuesday shows that immigrants play a leading role in innovation and economic growth in the United States. “Patent Pending: How Immigrants […]
There’s no such thing as universality in art, says Stephen Greenblatt. We always create and read from the perspective of our own time and place. What then accounts for the curious power some works have to communicate with us directly across the centuries?
It’s obvious why we are motivated to eat, drink and reproduce; the origins of our desire to push musical boundaries, on the other hand, are less clear.
New research out of Cambridge University in the U.K. finds that husbands who do households chores are happier and experience greater wellbeing. This finding surprised the researchers, who hypothesized that […]
“Can Scientists Just Find the God Particle Already?” That was Gawker’s amusing headline last December when scientists at the nuclear research center CERN reported “tantalizing glimpses” of the Higgs subatomic […]
I was going to flip a coin to decide whether or not to write about the Supreme Court RATS – an acronym a progressive blogger from Daily Kos invented for […]
Something unusually delightful greeted students on the morning of June 19 as they lined up to enter Public School 10 in Brooklyn. The event had nothing to do with standardized […]
In case you thought that Obama’s comments in favor of same-sex marriage, Romney’s tepid response and recent polls were signs that American society is surging toward a consensus on basic […]
So Cato Institute president Ed Crane is taking an “early retirement” and megabucks former BB&T CEO John Allison is set to take his place. It’s easy to see why Allison […]
On the basis of having for a time shared a house with a John Roberts clerk who conveyed to me no useful information about the Chief Justice’s cast of mind, […]