What can be said of revelatory moments in life whose meaning seems beyond the reach of words? Should anything be said at all? Philosopher Roger Scruton on the ineffable.
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Apparently you can teach some old dogs new tricks. In a piece by Digital Planet producer Colin Grant, artist David Hockney discusses his love affair with his iPhone and iPad […]
Jill Lepore, in her New Yorker piece on Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life (and on, more broadly, biography), put it beautifully: “There is no humility in monumental biography. But there […]
If we are truly worried about mitigating the social effects of drug use, we are likely to have more success regulating it than prohibiting it entirely.
Nation editor Chris Hayes will not be subbing for Keith Olbermann after all. I posted earlier that he was disinvited but, that was incorrect. Hayes tweeted: “OK: I’m not filling […]
What do you think of the advertisement below? Does it warm your heart? Does it bore you? Perhaps the answer depends on whether you’re a parent, or even more specifically, […]
Psychiatrists see a lot of people who are, to use the technical term, screwed up. Psychiatrists’ talk, then, often turns around curing, or ameliorating, or at least preventing “bad” behaviors […]
Several weeks ago, we featured OpenIDEO – innovation consultancy IDEO’s collaborative platform for concepting and implementing social-good projects. Open Planet Ideas, a partnership between Sony and WWF, is using IDEO’s […]
The recent shuttle launch has a strange passenger: a 330-pound humanoid robot called Robonaut 2, or R2 for short. It’s the first humanoid robot to be sent into space, and […]
MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has been suspended indefinitely without pay after Politico reported that he made campaign contributions to progressive Democrats: Olbermann made campaign contributions to two Arizona members of […]
Busy day for me here at the Department, so I just wanted to highlight some news, both from Merapi and beyond Merapi: The NASA Earth Observatory posted some great IR thermal images of a […]
Each and every democracy is sovereign. Each and every country, even if it is in alliance with others, has the sovereign right to make its own choices – albeit observing […]
After finishing The Help by Kathryn Stockett a couple of days ago, I just put the book down and sat still for a few minutes, letting the final remnants of […]
“Text messagers and computer gamers aren’t alone in the willful misspelling department. RNA molecules do it, too.”
In Senegal, money from Europe represents close to 10% of GDP. The flows of capital generated by migrant workers exceeds the foreign development aid Senegal receives.
“Psychopaths are a paradox. Many of them, like Bundy, are intellectually high functioning, and they clearly know right from wrong. They are not delusional, they are socially inept.”
“…green movements have continued to grow… What has changed is that a powerful counter-movement, led by corporate-funded thinktanks, has waged war on green policies.”
“The whole focus on ‘focus’ is…an act of intellectual cowardice — a way to criticize President Obama’s record without explaining what you would have done differently.”
“The United Nations has named oil-rich Norway as the country with the best quality of life, followed by Australia and New Zealand, while Asia has made the biggest strides.”
“Much of the discussion about torture concentrates on the moral and ethical dilemmas involved, but…these arguments…are irrelevant if torture doesn’t work in the first place.”
“Suddenly art history (once again) finds itself being turned on its head as another aspect of the past gets unearthed and revised.” This time the subject is the women Pop artists.
The narrow focus on ‘lifestyle factors’ has implied that when people get cancer, it’s their own fault. Is it time to focus more on environmentally induced cancers?rn
There has been a putative epidemic of bipolar among children in the U.S., and a corresponding rise in the pediatric use of antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and other drugs.
Crowdsourcing has become a hotly contested innovation paradigm in recent months, drawing highly polarized opinions. While its creative merit in design has been publicly decried in the recent GAP logogate […]
Every time I see a row of seaside lampposts, each with a single seagull perched on it, I wonder: Do those birds think we built the highway system for them? […]
I’ve been trying to update on the evolving situation at Merapi all day, but the news is just too fast and too tragic to keep up. I’ll try to keep updating […]
In the final guest post on Colorado’s defeated Amendment 62, a “personhood” initiative that would have given full legal rights to fertilized human eggs, Trina Stout examines the effect of […]
The Tea Party—with its flamboyant supporters and over-the-top rhetoric—makes good copy. It make such good copy that it sometimes gets more attention than its actual influence warrants. But give credit […]
Ocean pollution has been a topic of increasing concern lately and its devastating aftermath for marine life has been grimly documented. To raise awareness about the issue, Electrolux has introduced […]