Recently, while working on a piece about memory and smell, I came upon a concept that I’d never before heard about: blind smell. I’d read often enough about blindsight, the […]
All Articles
Quick update for late on Friday – much more to say on Monday. I promise. Really. Anyway, some brief news: Alaska: The dome is continuing to grow at Cleveland in […]
It’s hard to normalize the celebrity marriage and divorce for the rest of us. After all, we’re highly unlikely to end up married to an immigrant ex-bodybuilder, mega-Hollywood action star turned Governor who impregnates a member of our full-time housekeeping staff. These divorces should be consigned to the marriage equivalent of a Special Victims Unit.
THIS BLOG WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE HUFFINGTON POST ON FEBRUARY 9, 2011 Romance fades. Everyone knows this. The first flush of true love in marriage mellows into something less […]
Kris Broughton, a classy and eloquent BIG THINKER, is a particularly fervent defender of our president. Nonetheless, he’s warming up to MITT ROMNEY. He even believes that his anti-Obama rhetoric […]
Like a biblical parable, the typical human-behavior experiment is easily told and easily reduced to a message: People who pay with credit cards were more likely to have potato chips […]
Economist Daniel Altman predicts that “deep factors,” including endemic corruption and a Confucian business culture, will limit China’s growth, causing it to surrender the top spot shortly after becoming the world’s biggest economy.
The fact that the rabies virus can spread from an infected neuron to other neurons connected to it makes it an almost perfect vector for tracing connections in the brain.
If 19th century relationships were about forming alliances, and 20th century relationships about passion, how will the relationships of the 21st century be defined?
What is wrong with Mitt Romney? Why is the Republican Party wasting its time looking under every rock in Creation (pun intended) for someone who is just about guaranteed to […]
After controversy over its hiring of C.E.O.s from outside the company, Hewlett-Packard has hastily named Meg Whitman its newest chief executive. She joined the board eight months ago.
As a film critic, it was unlikely that Roger Ebert’s life would read like a movie script. But it has. Surviving and overcoming personal obstacles has showed him the value of life beyond the cinema.
Remember back in June when President Salih narrowly escaped an assassination attempt and flew to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment? A number of people predicted that was the end. Analysts […]
Sean Parker rocked the music world when he created Napster; his vision and paranoia helped to shape Facebook. Now 31 with $2.1 billion, he says he is just getting started.
What makes Russell Simmons so successful in business and philanthropy? The serial entrepreneur shares his strategy on turning an idea into a successful enterprise.
Big businesses are (once again) learning the lesson that bigger doesn’t always mean better. When aggressive mergers put a company in financial trouble, arrogance may be the motive.
I’ve spent much of today traveling, but there is still a lot going on in Yemen. Hopefully in the next couple of days Waq al-waq will have more of a […]
–Guest post by Paula Orlando, American University doctoral student. Should it take a public intellectual to decide what a public intellectual actually should be? The literature on public intellectuals presents […]
Would you choose the state of equality and justice envisioned by John Rawls or the state of radical individual liberty envisioned by Robert Nozick? This question is posed by Yale professor Tamar Gendler in this week’s Floating University lecture.
Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist interested in language as a window into the human mind. In this excerpt from his linguistics lecture for the Floating University, he illuminates some of the mysteries surrounding children’s hardwired ability to learn language.
My friend Jason Brennan, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, offers a short and sweet argument against the death penalty: Even if we grant for the sake of argument that […]
Google’s director of research, Alfred Spector, explains why artificial intelligence is crucial to the search company’s future in areas like natural language, machine learning and speech recognition.
Many believe that the next decade of technological innovations in the TV space will be defined by the possibilities of Internet-connected TV sets, such as tailored recommendations.
An environmentally friendly car which gets 200 miles per gallon and was partly made using 3-D printing technology has gone on show in Canada. Commercial production may begin in 2014.
The ‘hydrogen economy’ requires a lot of things, but first is an easy and cheap supply of hydrogen. A Penn State professor thinks he has found a way to access that supply.
Following the lead of its competitors, Amazon announced today that its Kindle users can follow a simple process to check out e-books from 11,000 community libraries across the country.
Here’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough in the “death of print” debate. If print books are limping toward extinction, why do so many writers—even the youngest, Web-savviest […]
The state of Georgia just killed Troy Davis. Which is to say, a number of individual human beings acting under the imagined authority of the state of Georgia killed Troy […]
By the time the Persians destroyed the Roman military garrison at Dura-Europos in 256 AD, the city high above the Euphrates River existed for almost six centuries since its founding […]
Most of us have little idea what the fighting in Sanaa over the past several days has been like. We can imagine if not quite comprehend the daily struggles that […]