Matt Yglesias and Timothy Noah are having an interesting dialogue about Noah’s new book about income inequality, The Great Divergence. (As are Brink Lindsey and Mark Schmitt at Washington Monthly.) Noah […]
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The Presidential Medal of Freedom. Where will Bob Dylan place this honor on a trophy case that includes his Grammy Awards, Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Honorary Doctorates, Pulitzer Prize special […]
My Tuesday post examined parents’ limited options in the age of the standardized test. But what is a teacher to do who is fed up with the testing regime? “I’d […]
Good intentions can lead to bad outcomes in business. This is especially true in organizations that have toxic cultures in which leaders tout worthy values–and then put up roadblocks that prevent employees from […]
Since Herman Cain dropped out of the presidential race, Mitt Romney has added 500,000 Facebook fans. This brings him to a total of 1,644,358 page likes, most from his 2008 […]
Garrett Jones, guest-blogging for Megan McArdle, classifies memorable experience as a “consumer durable,” since the satisfaction lasts and lasts. Jones writes: People often shrink from driving to a distant, promising […]
A microchip equipped with 20 gel posts can perform 20 genetic tests using just one drop of blood. It may be the advance the new era of personalized medicine has been waiting for.
We expect works of art to enlighten us, and we expect science to enlighten us — yet the two fields are frequently regarded as separate, distinct entities which we respond to using different areas of the brain. Are those distinctions are arbitrary?
My American University colleague Charles Lewis with a team of partners has launched a fascinating new multi-media initiative called “Investigating Power,” which features oral history interviews with the country’s great […]
Learning how to leverage the advances of a failed business to create a new product has proven essential to many of the world’s most successful companies. It helps in raising funds, too.
Last week I posted on the CIA’s request to carry out “signature strikes” in Yemen. I made quite clear my opposition to the policy, not because I’m opposed to drones […]
While Nevada wants to make self-driving cars identifiable to human drivers, the truth is that smart cars have more to be worried about by putting themselves on the road with us.
The most active, often eloquent, and judgmental of our ex-presidents—Jimmy Carter—explains why he would be comfortable with President Mitt Romney: “I’d rather have a Democrat but I would be comfortable,” […]
Comedian, director of digital for The Onion, and social media wunderkind Baratunde Thurston says we’re living in an age of information overabundance, but that this needn’t be a problem. Just as […]
As I wrote last year in a chapter at the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change & Society, the imagined public relative to climate change remains a source of ever growing anxiety […]
“Do you know how rarely the news in 2012 looks and sounds how you thought news would look and sound in 2012?” joked Jon Stewart on a recent episode of […]
Once again, I’ve gotten enmeshed in a debate on Twitter. This time it wasn’t with a theist, but with two atheists, Daniel Loxton and Reed Esau. It started with these […]
That’s the bold prediction of Kristian Hammond, an executive at Narrative Science, a company that translates data into natural language. He predicts a robot will win the Pulitzer in five years.
Despite predictions to the contrary, Intel has developed a new computer chip which fits more transistors into a smaller space. Computer power is still looking set to increase into the future.
There’s a universal truth in the online world. Scan the discussion pages of any article featuring the words Apple or Android and the comments page will be a battleground for […]
My latest column is now up on AlterNet, Apocalypse Soon: Why Are Christians So Obsessed With the End Times? In it, I trace the long and ignoble history of failed […]
As I’ve been writing about for the past several years, the key to public engagement on climate change is to tell personally relevant stories about the issue. An effective method […]
GPS technology is opening up exciting new hybrid forms of mapping and art. Or in this case: cycling, mapping and art. The maps on this page are the product of […]
Bryan Sykes is the author of DNA USA, which documents his journey across America, Easy Rider style, as he describes it, to record a genetic portrait of the nation. What […]
According to Dr. Mark Hyman, we’re at a watershed moment in science and medicine in which we need to learn how to change the environment around us in order to create the “best expression of our genes.”
While scientists jump to answer this notoriously difficult question, scientific observation is not well suited to finding the cosmic will that the question implies. This stumper is better left alone.
It’s commonplace to imagine the people of the period we know now as the High Renaissance, centered in Italy from the 1490s to the 1520s, looking at the works of […]
The NAO is a fully programmable, 57cm humanoid robot made by Alderaban Robotics. This cute robot contains a full array of body language, text and visual recognition, as well as […]
Pamela Haag: “Whenever I hear a headline like ‘Marriage Ruined by Cheating,’ I’m tempted to point to a divorce somewhere else and declare, ‘Marriage Ruined by Monogamy.’
While talk of mining near-Earth asteroids has concentrated on metals like gold and platinum, the real treasure may be mining water and using its hydrogen to propel ambitious space missions.