“Effective signals in a marketplace have the characteristic that the people with a high quality product have lower costs of emitting the signal than people with a low quality product, […]
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Hello from snowy Minnesota! I’m here at Gustavus Adolphus College to give a talk for the Geology Department (special thanks to Dr. Elli Goeke for inviting me out!) Thought I’d […]
Silicon Valley greats tend to leave a host of successful entrepreneurs in their wake. But now “successful alumni” are starting to include people who were never really alumni to start with.
With nearly 5 billion mobile phone users worldwide, mobile networks are the most powerful communication technology systems today. But they are still centralized, top-down networks wherein a cellular provider disseminates […]
To Regain Civility in American Politics, We Need to Rethink Media, Education, and How We Participate
Whether it is climate change, immigration, or income inequality, America seems incapable of making progress on solving complex problems. In fact, it seems that the country is locked in a […]
Just before leaving New York to return to England, I went with my family to visit a former journalist colleague who lives with her partner and two gorgeous young boys […]
Budding public intellectual and critic of foreign aid, Dambisa Moyo says the promises of globalization have not been realized. The Independent interviews the economist.
David Foster Wallace studies is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise; the late author will likely become America’s next canonized writer, says Jennifer Howard.
Why is it that astrobiologists consider water a prerequisite when seeking out alien life? Steve Nerlich of Universe Today details what alien biochemistry would look like.
Clay Shirky says that social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere—which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months.
Researchers have made strides in understanding the human mind, filling the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy, says David Brooks at The New Yorker.
Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo’s most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one.
Across the Internet the use of “Dear” is going the way of sealing wax; email has come to be viewed as informal even when used as formal communication.
It seems inevitable that the number of books sold through bookstores will plummet, says Judge Posner. Traditional bookstores are doomed, concurs Nobel Laureate Becker.
Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue, says the conservative columnist Ross Douthat.
The Arizona shooting suspect has been called ‘unstable,’ and no motive has been identified. But did the vitriol in the debates over immigration and health care trigger the attack?
In 15 to 20 years, says futurist Ray Kurzweil, a biotechnology revolution will yield powerful ways for us to reprogram our genes. Our bodies will be altered on the genetic […]
The foremost quality that makes wood wood, both as a material and as a metaphor, is its inflexible rigidity. Dutch designer Carolien Laro, however, has challenged this age-old conception with […]
When a disaster devastates a country’s infrastructure, we tend to think about physical infrastructure damages — roads, telecommunication, delivery routes. But the damage to information systems can often be even […]
Sometimes I find myself feeling sorry for Thomas Robert Malthus. You remember Malthus, he was the one who argued that humanity was destined to remain in poverty because every time […]
Yemen is a confusing place and of all the opaque places within the country my vote for the most confusing is Abyan. Last week we talked about jihadi tensions that […]
Country Strong hasn’t been taken seriously by film critics. I’m not going to review what they’ve said or speculate on why they said it. I’m just going to explain why […]
Today, Saudi Arabia is out with a new wanted list of 47 men it believes have fled the kingdom and joined the jihad abroad. Many, according to this AFP report, […]
In a recent article, MSNBC called Facebook the divorce lawyer’s new best friend. Social media allows people to easily meet and flirt with attractive people, diverting attention and time away from […]
The Republican Party owns hate speech in America the way Bill Gates owns Microsoft. But by the end of the day, what’s left of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords life will be […]
Having a larger waistline may shrink your brain. Obesity is linked to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, which is known to be associated with cognitive impairment.
An analysis by The Economist finds that over the ten years to 2010, no fewer than six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa.
Maybe the danger of digital culture to young people is not that they have hummingbird attention spans but that they are going deaf.
Treasury Secretary Geithner’s letter to Congress on the debt ceiling warns that if Washington doesn’t raise the government’s borrowing limit, the economy will face catastrophe.
Trader Anthony Grisanti claims that market consolidation and electronic trading have driven up the price of oil and taken the power out of the hands of the traditional pit trader.