All Articles

On January 1, 2016, one of the most infamous books of the 20th century — Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf — enters public domain and can be published by anyone in Germany for the first time since the end of World War II. Seventy years after the fall of the Nazis, people still debate allowing that particularly evil genii out of the bottle to influence young minds. Others argue that the genii’s been out of the bottle all along, either through underground sources or, more recently, the Internet. More controllable, however, have been the propaganda films of the Nazis, whose chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, announced in 1941 that, “Film is our most important medium for propaganda.” Felix Moeller’s new documentary Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Film examines this question of allowing new generations to see these banned films and, if so, how to show them without that evil history repeating itself.

“So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it’s gratifying to have something you have done linger in people’s memories.”

The death of any given person is just a lack of connectedness to future experiences. 

But I use that term loosely.

Liberals and conservatives unite when thinking of America’s Golden Age — a fictionalized time whose history we constantly rewrite. 

You can’t expect to foster effective K-12 education using outdated and analog methods to educate kids raised on digital.

Some day fact-checking will be as easy as using spell-check.

Nowhere in American politics do cultural proxy wars play out more vividly than in the chambers of the United States Supreme Court.

What happened when a team of researchers slapped a button and a countdown timer on Reddit? A community formed.

How, with a sunny solstice, you can figure out how much our planet is tilted! “Soon the earth will tilt on its axis and begin to dance to the reggae […]

Sometimes a small business model is the way to go, so companies don’t have to sell off user data to make money.

“There’s a very basic human, nonverbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn’t have to do with body movements; it doesn’t have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual.”

Turns out groups help us define our individual identities, which boosts our sense of self.

“The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we’re reading, we’re thinking. It’s a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we’re looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there’s not as much reflective time. And it’s the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.”  

A quote from author Joyce Carol Oates: “The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.” She believes hard work and tenacity are the main ingredients for success. Do you agree?

Words of wisdom from the American author (and prolific tweeter): “Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

How do you “play the game the right way”? Depends who you ask.

It just depends on the level of environmental activism going on in your state.

A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those […]

Researchers collected a number of scientific studies about how children of same-sex couples turn out and find no evidence that they are negatively affected.

Surrounding schools with green spaces may help boost cognition in kids.

I attacked a famous artist for no apparent reason. 

To help the trick-or-treaters in wheelchairs have truly amazing costumes, rather than be Superman or The Little Mermaid in a wheelchair, the nonprofit Magic Wheelchair makes epic Halloween costumes by transforming wheelchairs into “awesomeness created by our hands and [the kids’] imagination.”

Ten years ago, a researcher claimed most published research findings are false; now a decade later, his claim is stronger than ever before. How can this be?

Honesty truly is the best policy.

And what does your choice say about your personality?

Your brain is perfectly capable of remembering a random passphrase; we’re all just to lazy to work on memorizing it.

Questions like, “What will happen when it all goes wrong?” are at the top of the list.

Will warning labels help prevent the purchase of soda, especially among young teens? Researchers say no.

The Barnes Foundation’s current exhibition, Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, Fred Wilson: The Order of Things, epitomizes the business buzz phrase “disruptive innovation” like few other museum shows (which I wrote about here). Disrupt or die, the thinking goes. Old orders must make way for new. Coincidentally, as the Barnes Foundation, home of Dr. Albert Barnes’ meticulously and idiosyncratically ordered collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces left just so since his death in 1951, invites outsider artists to question and challenge Dr. Barnes’ old order, it also publishes their own insider’s critical “warts and all” assessment of Dr. Barnes’ relationship to African art and African-Americans. In African Art in the Barnes Foundation: The Triumph of L’Art nègre and the Harlem Renaissance, scholar Christa Clarke reassesses Dr. Barnes intentions and results in his building of the first great African art collection in America. “More than just formal accents to modernist paintings and other Western art in the collection,” Clarke argues, “African art deserves to be seen as central to the aesthetic mission and progressive vision that was at the very heart of the Barnes Foundation.”