@BronxZoosCobra has 12,165 twitter followers as of this writing. We live in the digital age, communicating instantaneously across continents, but we’re still just a bunch of primates chattering about where […]
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If it lives up to its initial promise, the much-ballyhooed new app Color represents a fundamentally new type of mobile social network that, in many ways, is almost the polar opposite of Facebook. What’s so radical about it? For one, Color has done away entirely with the notion of the Friend.
In less than two weeks, I’ll be taking a short pilgrimage from San Francisco to Monterey for the e.g. — an event that has been summarized to me by a previous attendee as “what TED […]
We have never learned how to use instructional media in our schools in any predictable or systematic way. An even greater problem is that we have not learned how to […]
Big Think spoke to The New York Times chief theater critic, Ben Brantley, about the present and future state of journalism and online criticism.
Men and women tend to use humor differently, says the New Yorker cartoonist.
Getting over half a million hits on your very first post is every blogger’s dream. That’s what happened to Prof. William Cronon, a distinguished professor of American history at the […]
Want millions of people to read your blog every month? Listen to these tips from blogging pioneer Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish.
The utility at Fukushima (TEPCO) announced that radioactive water was found to be 10 million times normal levels at Unit 2, prompting evacuation of that site and world wide anguish […]
As I’ve noted before, long-term demographic trends in the U.S. work against the Republican Party. As Michael Grunwald put it, the country is steadily becoming “less white, less rural, less Christian.” […]
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different,” wrote T.S. Eliot in a […]
Can and should we try to drill deep into the earth, past the crust and into the mantle? We’ve tried in the past but haven’t gotten far. If the earth was an orange, we’d have barely zested it.
As Europe takes the lead on the Libyan intervention, it’s a powerful signal of America’s weakening global influence. Peter Beinart on Obama’s Jeffersonian turn—and the end of an empire.
As Middle East regimes try to stifle dissent by censoring the Internet, the U.S. faces an uncomfortable reality: its companies provide much of the technology used to block websites.
Germany and Pakistan may be apples and oranges, but the point is that the current artistic and creative ferment in Pakistan is not sustainable, just as the Weimar Republic fell to fascism.
Forbes’ Gordon Chang echoes American politicians’ calling for military intervention in Syria. Our foreign policy interests are at stake, he says, and it’s not worth waiting for international consensus.
An Amnesty International reports says that while opposition to the death penalty has gained much global support, powerful countries like the U.S. and China continue to execute convicts.
As the world rallies behind the Libyan population, it is hard to understand why the Ivory Coast—where civil war is brewing—is just a footnote in international news and on the diplomatic agenda.
An E.U. bailout of Portugal now seems inevitable. But at some point, E.U. taxpayers are likely to tire of bailing out nations like Portugal, which seem unwilling to curb their spendthrift ways.
By day, Aleksei N. Navalny is a lawyer in Moscow. By night, he runs a website that exposes corruption in the Russian energy sector. A friend of the people, he is making government enemies.
Analysts in the U.S. and Europe did not expect revolutions in the Arab world, and those who did, did not expect them to come from such unlikely actors or be this widespread and peaceful.
Three of the world’s great armies have suddenly conspired to support a group of people in the coastal cities of Libya, known, vaguely, as “the rebels”. But what do we really know about them?
Where is Twin Peaks? The fictional town at the centre of the eponymous TV series isn’t too hard to pinpoint. But things aren’t so clear cut as they seem.
The reactor situation in Japan suffered yet another setback yesterday, with water levels in Unit 2 registering 10 million times normal levels.
A deadly Egyptian cobra is AWOL from the Bronx Zoo. Anybody got a spare mongoose? [Photo credit: Pandiyan, Creative Commons.]
I don’t know if this is such an appropriate post for Sunday morning. A study from Northwestern shows that people who regularly attend religious services are 50% more likely to become […]
This study just out in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin claims to have found a general societal prejudice against women who breast-feed. Reports about the work concurred. But I think […]
It has been a few weeks since the new activity at Kilauea along the Kamoamoa Fissure stopped, but little else started back up along the volcano’s east rift. The Kamoamoa […]
Orr’s piece in the New York Times Book Reviewon an O magazine photo shoot with young poets is a perfect example of how to write about something you know a […]
People who experience the “impostor phenomenon” believe their successes are undeserved—and they live in constant fear of being unmasked despite consistently good performance.