All Articles

As Silicon Valley startups race to develop the next generation of sophisticated, algorithmic marketing software, it’s instructive to note the success of Thinkmodo – a viral marketing firm that films all its videos on iphones, does no market testing, and doesn’t even mention the name of the product in its campaigns.  

A new pair of buildings opened at NASA’s Ames Research Center use technology and design to create as much energy as they use, modeling what manned bases on other planets will look like. 

Slate recently highlighted the fastest-growing industries in the USA – everything from hot sauce to self-tanning products to 3D printers to generic pharmaceuticals. Here’s one industry they missed: the recycled […]

Back in January, I wrote about Jessica Ahlquist’s court victory over an illegal “School Prayer” banner in her high school in Cranston, Rhode Island. That was almost the end of […]

Is there an economic story that explains the origin of marriage, the most-debated-of-all-institutions, as well as divorce?

Last week I asked readers to answer this single question: “What is democracy?” I asked this question — without consulting a dictionary or political science textbook — because I am […]

James Cameron, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Peter Diamandis aren’t afraid to fail.  If these men were afraid, they wouldn’t be attempting the most ambitious private space exploration […]

The idea of creating mixed boards is gaining significant traction, due to several key global trends. 

John Gray’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is fun because Gray is vehemently opposed to almost everything, but he clearly thinks this is a pretty good book anyway. […]

A new venture called Planetary Resources plans to send a fleet of droids to space to prospect the most valuable near-Earth asteroids. The project will require billions of investment dollars but could yield a trillion dollar reward. 

UPDATE: Steve Jobs famously said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” I wanted […]

Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, is best known as the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency […]

To make a resume for how today’s bosses read them—quickly and mercilessly—you’ll need to learn about white space, dumb algorithms and lingerie. You should drop your photo, too.

In a previous post, I indicated what I consider the “dangerous” realisation that there is no top-down meaning; that our actions aren’t found to be important by anyone (or One) […]

Is there something about rapid technological change that necessitates bold cultural shifts? If so, that might explain why so many Internet companies have run afoul of regulation. 

Are digital devices ruining our ability to have deep and meaningful conversations, emphasizing desperate and superficial connections instead? How can we sustain healthy relationships? 

The right brain training regimen that harnessed the brain’s natural plasticity and helped to strengthen these specific cognitive systems might help.

What conditions are scientists looking for in their search for life on another planet? The presence of water is key, explains Bill Nye, aka The Science Guy. 

The regime of standardized testing in the nation’s public schools is expanding. Soon, children as young as 5 will devote weeks of the school year to preparing and sitting for multiple-choice exams. What is a parent to do?

To what extent should our desire for Internet freedom allow the industry to operate outside of laws that are meant to protect the public good. Whose responsibility is it to protect children? 

This is follow-up to last week’s post on crowdfunding and the opportunities it could provide for the so called teacherpreneurs. Let’s take it as an alternative to the traditional forms […]

If Google’s lobbying spree continues, it will outspend all the tobacco companies and major banks. And with new cyber security bills before Congress, the fight for Internet freedom remains. 

For Washington, DC readers, please join us and spread the word about the presentation tomorrow (Wed. April 25) at American University by Timothy Caulfield, among Canada’s leading experts in the […]

With bookstores vanishing, the Pulitzer committee skimping on Pulitzers, and the Amazon dragon twining its bright yellow coils around every publisher on Earth, the book industry finds itself in dire peril. But lo! What […]

What is the Big Idea? From Ben Franklin to Steve Jobs, America has always been a land of inventors and tinkerers, according to Adam Davidson, economic columnist for The New […]

Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, says you can’t rely on “the media” or the internet to control your information consumption. Here he suggests a few pieces of software that have helped him to regulate his own information diet. 

It looks like a new front in the “war on women” has opened up, and it involves America’s nuns. A friend of mine who belongs to a women-led Catholic community […]

The French know a thing or two about cooking food so might they better understand how to eat it, too? Their midday lunch breaks make people more sociable and more productive. 

Is Facebook making us lonely? No! Sometimes there are actually clear answers to rhetorical headline questions. Claude Fischer, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, gets empirical in the Boston Review. […]

New draft guidelines drawn up by the German government say that future military missions should not be focused on spreading Western conceptions of democracy