The relationship between literary talent and literary fame is not so interesting to discuss (being so much discussed, and yet being uniquely subjective). Why should we care if the writers […]
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How connecting cutting-edge technologies with the people who need them the most is revolutionizing the traditional aid model and empowering communities to take charge of their own well-being.
Long before reality television challenged our faith in the sustainability of the human race, documentary films were an intriguing look into the minds and hearts of some fascinating subjects. By […]
“Where is everybody?” the physicist Enrico Fermi once famously asked, disappointed that aliens hadn’t contacted us yet. Over 50 years later, Fermi would feel even more snubbed. As Paul Davies […]
“Instead of creating a joint military, Europe must now be worried about keeping its common currency. Europe could end where it began: in Greece,” writes writes Christoph Schwennicke.
A Japanese mathematician has come up with a cardboard model that seems to defy physics—creating what vision scientists are calling the best illusion of the year.
War-on-terror hawks may believe we must kill and intimidate people who have some nebulous terrorist intent. But Robert Wright is surprised that President Obama would entertain the notion.
In the wake of the housing bust, some squatters are doing so not for financial expediency, but because they reject the idea that homes be treated as commodities.
While in in the past we thought of the earth’s core as fairly homogeneous, it’s now clear that the solid center of the earth is an aggregation of crystals.
William Saletan argues that we shouldn’t ask Elena Kagan is she’s gay, and she needn’t volunteer an answer. Forced disclosure isn’t just a threat to the nomination, he writes, it’s a threat to freedom.
Walter Rodgers suggests the vocalized concerns of tea partiers about big government mask a fear among aging, white Americans of their own diminishing political power.
Sam Harris argued recently that “morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.” He talks about the backlash from people who believe it’s wrong to make moral judgments.
Some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about ways to work with publishers and save quality journalism and information content.
David B. Hart writes that the “New Atheism” has “proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment.”
Since the murder of a middle school principal in the suburbs of DC last month, the Washington Post has grappled with the complexities of how much to disclose about a victim’s […]
Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama’s new nominee for the Supreme Court, is by all accounts spectacularly brilliant. She was also, by all accounts, did a fantastic Dean of Harvard […]
If Sylvia Earle’s older brother had never borrowed their neighbor’s copper diving helmet and taken his kid sister for a dip in the Weeki Wachee River not far from their […]
Oil giant BP announced a new plan to staunch the high-pressure oil geyser befouling the Gulf of Mexico, they call it the Top Hat. The Top Hat is a slightly […]
While Matt Gross writes a column called the Frugal Traveler for the New York Times, it doesn’t mean he keeps to a strict budget when he’s on the road. To […]
There are rare moments when I read a story in the news and feel like I am reading my own writing. It happened again yesterday when I read a piece […]
Beginning Friday, shoppers at more than 6,000 drugstores will be able to pick up a test to scan their genes for a propensity for Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes and other ailments.
Stephan Faris writes that “it seems unrealistic to base policies on the expectation that asymptomatic HIV-positive youth will permanently abstain from sex.”
Are certain elements of music hard-wired into our brains? If there are universals in how we perceive music and respond to it, our musical sense might have some adaptive value.
The cost of Wall Street’s most recent innovations can be measured in the trillions of dollars. But they have also damaged the whole notion of financial innovation.
New research indicates that paternal mice that physically interact with their offspring grow new brain cells and form lasting memories of the babies.
Last Thursday, May 6th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1000 points in a matter of minutes and we still don’t know why it happened. Heidi Moore investigates.
“Couples in lasting marriages have at least five small positive interactions (touching, smiling, paying a compliment) for every negative one (sneering, eye rolling, withdrawal).”
A number of new therapies have been developed for the treatment of chronic pain. Most borrow from the field of anesthesiology and share a goal of preventing pain signals from reaching the brain.
Over the weekend BP’s latest effort at stanching the Deepwater Horizon oil spill failed. The New York Times asked five experts to weigh in on what might now be done.
Nathaniel Rich writes that Ray Bradbury’s best stories are “have a strange familiarity about them. They’re like long-forgotten acquaintances—you know you’ve met them somewhere before.”