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On Sunday the New York Times published reviews of the two best new fiction books I’ve read in 2011: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, and Anatomy of a […]

The eccentric magiciansPenn and Teller used to come onstage naked at the beginning of performances, to demonstrate they didn’t have any “tricks up their sleeves.” And yet, Penn Jillette (the […]

Take two strapping young men. Give one of them a job as a lifeguard from May until September. For the same period, pay the other one to “farm gold” in […]

The Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation magazine have won this month’s Sidney Award for excellence in socially conscious journalism, the Sidney Hillman Foundation announced Tuesday. The winning […]

I am thinking about investing in a husband. While it is true that I won’t be able to sell him in the future if I ever need some quick cash […]

Start-up Badgeville is launching a new product called Social Fabric that aims to go beyond gamification to give companies more ability to drive user behavior.

For some strange reason, I ended up watching the new movie The Help yesterday, less than twenty four hours after viewing Driving Miss Daisy for the first time. The most […]

More than other devices, the tablet can know enough about you to understand the context around your queries and give you better answers when you search.

Great Big Ideas, the first Floating University course, features twelve of the most important thinkers and practitioners in their fields. These lecturers are constantly making news, and in this blog, […]

The big issue for reporters, editors, and publishers isn’t automated text generation. It’s the explosion of free human-authored content on the Web.

Great for consumers, bad for authors? As Amazon prepares to launch its long-rumored Android-powered tablet, it is also reportedly thinking about an e-book rental service.

Digital fitness–the ability to adapt to changes in the digital environment—is lacking in the PR sector though it was an early adopter of social media. Time to rethink traditional PR tactics.

Guest Post by Jenna Le. Jenna Le has worked as a physician in Queens and the Bronx, New York City. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Six Rivers, was published by New York […]

We have argued for decades that we are running out of space for our garbage in the thousands of landfills currently peppering the globe… Now we are faced with another […]

A body of running water may be called any of many different names, the most generic being stream, the most common being river.  A river can be defined as ‘a […]

While some inventions will remain forever confined to the pages of science fiction novels, much of what we’ve dreamed up in books – warp drive, star gates, portals through space and time – will one day make the leap in to living rooms everywhere.

It has been awhile since I’ve talked about the volcanoes of Colombia – they’ve had a fairly quiet year, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is going on. If you […]

My friend Bryan Caplan, the iconoclastic George Mason economist (redundant?), has long waged jihad against the “self-interested voter hypothesis,” which is the hypothesis that voters prefer and vote for policies […]

Thanks to huge loans from the Chinese Government, solar manufacturing has shifted from being led by a geographically disperse group to one dominated by Chinese companies.

Dream of bashing in Michelle Bachmann’s ferocious grin? Ripping open the capacious gut of Gingrich? Frying that execution-lovin’ Rick Perry? Dissecting Mitt Romney to see if he’s as weird on […]

“I define an expert as someone who can tell you exactly how something can’t be done,” says X Prize founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis. 

So obviously the division of human inquiry into the sciences and the humanities is ridiculous.  Reality, after all, is one. The opinion of scientists tends to be that they’re all […]

The financial crisis and its excesses have spurned alternative banking initiatives. One of them is ethical banking, which stands for total transparency and invests only in the real economy.

When we remember, what is it that we’re remembering? Do we try to recapture the appearance of a moment, like a photograph or a postcard that shows us a perfect […]

The rest of the euro zone is losing patience with Greece. Germany is even working on scenarios exploring what would happen if Greece left the euro zone.

In what some see as the opposite of globalization, many Gulf countries have been investing in foreign farmland, mainly in fertile Africa, to serve as their bread basket.

U.S. Government attempts to drive up the price of medicine in developing countries, as described in leaked cables, amounts to state-sponsored violence, writes James Love.

“Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend”                                                     […]

Rather than wringing their hands over young people’s fecklessness, educators, politicians, CEOs, and other leaders of this rising generation must learn to engage its need for a higher purpose by setting lofty and meaningful goals

I’m not happy at work. That is what more and more workers around the world are saying today. In fact, according to a new survey, between 28% and 56% of […]