The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the caliber of their scholarship, says Simon Head.
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It’s been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the academic Richard Dawkins and the essayist Christopher Hitchens, believers have hit back.
If you want to know what industry will power the next U.S. economy, follow the money. Where are investors really looking? And where is research and experimentation really happening?
The Mexican government has been using the army to fight the nation’s drug cartels for about four years. It isn’t working. Some critics say the army is part of the problem.
One is a gadget-maker, the other a search engine—but now Apple and Google are at odds. Robert Lane Greene reports on how each company requires a different leap of faith.
The best way to face the future and tackle diet-related problems is to arm people with knowledge and skills. The Economist compiles the year’s best dietary advice.
Christmas is one night that is allowed to rip itself from the continuum and to exist all on its own, a mystery and damnation to all the clocks ticking away below.
We can all simplify our traditions and distill our expectations to their essence: a time of joy and peace. Adele Stan says she found the true meaning of Christmas by not celebrating it.
Last week I vowed to pay more attention to replication in psychology experiments. Repeated experiments are an important test of whether a finding is “really out there” or an accident, […]
Last month, we looked at Meltware – an ingenious line of DIY tableware made out of palm tree wax. Now, a similar and even more playful project is applying the same […]
Like Satan, he is known by many names—Sinterklaas, Père Noël, Tomte—but we Americans call him Santa Claus. The long white beard, red outfit, reindeer, etc., all seem like givens to […]
Homelessness is perhaps the most disconcerting reminder of the staggering gap between the rich and the poor in some of the world’s wealthiest nations. In Detroit alone, more than 18,000 […]
Recently I have found myself in trouble twice for my choice of words. The first time was for calling sex workers “prostitutes,” and the second time was for calling prostitutes […]
2010 was the year good old-fashioned, blame-it-on-the-breeding-masses overpopulation theory re-entered the mainstream. There’s just too many Malthusians, says Tim Black.
Behind our destructive system of unbridled capitalism is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Let’s celebrate it and help it grow in the future, says Rebecca Solnit.
Hot on the heels of a series of international U.F.O. sighting disclosures, the New Zealand government has joined the party and made public 2,000 pages of U.F.O. eyewitness accounts.
The Spanish House of Representatives has rejected new legislation under which hundreds of file-sharing sites that are currently perfectly legal, could have been shut down.
What’s the difference between new ideas that are good, and those that are merely novel? Professor Alan Jacobs insists on asking moral questions as technology progresses.
No more will soldiers’ vision be limited to the socket-embedded spheres that God intended. The Pentagon wants troops to see dangers coming at them from all directions.
One thing a school might be doing in generally educating the student is teaching him or
her appropriate patterns of responsible civic behavior, says Harvard professor Sean Kelly.
It may not feel like it in the West, but this is, in many ways, the best of times. Optimism is on the move—with important consequences for both the hopeful and the hopeless.
Perhaps being a procrastination addict isn’t such a bad thing. There may be surprising benefits to putting things off, says Columbia Business School professor Eric Abrahamson.
Influencers are what makes the greentech industry world go round, so here are the 10 individuals that have had the biggest effect on the greentech sector this year.
When 71 senators to voted to ratify New START it was a huge victory for Obama and the Democrats. The vote would normally have been a victory for Republicans. The […]
Amanda Marcotte has a brilliant essay in Slate on the rape allegations against Julian Assange and the Catch-22 of why more victims don’t come forward. We’re bombarded with erroneous stereotypes […]
We all know that Yemen has serious problems that are not limited to just AQAP. But there have also been a few bright spots in recent months. Topping the list […]
Against all odds and predictions the Food Safety and Modernization Act passed Congress this week. President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, the first major overhaul of the country’s […]
Today Charlie Savage of the New York Times, who does an excellent job making complicated legal stories understandable, has a piece on the latest bit of Guantanamo Bay news. According […]
The Christmas season should be a lot less long. We should do more, if not all, of our carol singing, partying, giving, and such between Christmas and Epiphany.
“2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem.” As reflections on the WikiLeaks saga turn into prognosticating about the future of cyber-security, so […]