I interrupt your regularly scheduled crushing negativity for a little effusive praise… I’m very proud to report that my boyfriend, Darcy James Argue, kicked all kinds of ass in DownBeat’s […]
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In two days, To Kill A Mockingbird turns fifty. God bless this book. For whatever reasons, we still need this books in our lives, on our syllabi; we still need […]
Violinist and humanitarian Midori Goto stopped by the Big Think offices today. She played show and tell with her priceless violin, made in 1734, which she said she thinks of […]
Church and State both took tentative strides towards granting gays and lesbians greater rights yesterday. In Massachusetts a federal judge overturned the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which bars the […]
It’s a bit of an overstatement to say that Americans don’t care at all about what’s happening outside of our borders, but Jim Hoge, the longtime editor of Foreign Affairs […]
In the history of the Universe, life—and human life in particular—has not been around for very long. But University of Michigan theoretical astrophysicist Katie Freese believes it’s possible that life […]
The Jewish community in Britain represents only one-half of one percent of the population, but Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks believes it need not have a commensurate voice in the “human […]
The Daily Show sent its newest correspondent, Olivia Munn, to Phoenix to interview a state senator who wants to ban photo radar as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but who […]
The amount of money hedge funds make is only surpassed by the amount of secrecy surrounding how they make it. To pull back the curtain on these financial wizards, Big […]
Ken Coates who has died at the age of 79 of a suspected heart attack was actively engaged in radical British politics, writing and as ever bubbling with new ideas almost hours […]
There was a time when you could reliably blame just about anything gone wrong from the weather to the size of your bank account on blacks or minorities and the […]
“The spread of digital technology comes at a cost: it exposes armies and societies to digital attack,” says The Economist, which thinks cyberspace must be treated as a theater of war.
Spiegel follows the “Elvis of cultural studies” to a conference in Berlin where he presents his esoteric and eccentric ideas on the behavior of “late capitalism”.
Two independent reports have exonerated the “Climategate” scientists, but you wouldn’t know it to read the news. Salon.com takes on the wet-noodle, mainstream press.
“An aircraft fueled by the sun has accomplished its first ever manned night flight,” reports the New Scientist. The Swiss aircraft broke several records for a piloted solar flight.
“We’ve plenty to protest about in the US, but on the streets there is no dissent. Why is our liberal mood so paralytic?” Clancy Sigel blames a host of culprits, including the Internet.
Government scientists have found natural HIV antibodies necessary for an AIDS vaccine, reports Scientific American, but stimulating their production in the body remains a hurdle.
“How does a defunct and discredited diplomatic process continue to masquerade as a success despite its utter failures?” An Al Jazeera analyst writes about the Middle East “peace process”.
“By the end of next year, there’s a good chance that Android devices will have displaced the iPhone in terms of sales.” The Independent predicts closed-source programming will end Apple.
“The Gulf oil spill ranks as the nation’s worst environmental disaster only if you ignore the great ongoing spill in the sky.” The L.A. Times says air pollution gets a pass, but shouldn’t.
Thinking of launching its own social network site, Google has criticized Facebook’s “friend” function because it creates networks that don’t respect the boundaries of real life.
Growing up, I spent many a rainy or wintry Saturday afternoon watching classic old horror films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man or Dracula Vs. Frankenstein. It always seemed […]
Are spies like us? Just watch this. And then, well ensconced in romance and nostalgia, consider that Ian Fleming said—or did he write?—that “men want a woman whom they can […]
Will Saletan of Slate casually likened competitive eating bouts to pornography, whereupon Katy Kelleher of Jezebel became justifiably indignant on behalf of pornography In fairness to porn, competitive eating only […]
Yesterday a British panel exonerated climate scientists at the center of last year’s Climategate scandal. The scientists had been charged with manipulating scientific evidence to support their beliefs in global […]
Is Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” sexist, as a recent post from Jezebel’s Irin Carmon suggests? A collection of female staffers from the program have publicly disagreed, and Slate’s Emily […]
What should the U.S. do about the 26 million people who are currently unemployed, underemployed or marginally attached in the labor force? Boston College sociology professor Juliet Schor thinks that […]
It probably wouldn’t have been that hard—from some angle—to get a picture of President Obama by himself on a Louisiana beach looking down at the ground, apparently at a loss. […]
In the throes of the financial crisis of 2008, novelist Tom Wolfe was asked where the downturn left his Masters of the Universe—the iconic testosterone-driven magnates of Wall Street featured […]
With so much information being stored in Web databases around the world, data now created will potentially stay recorded in the memory cloud forever. That’s why Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Director of […]