While he’s kept his profile remarkably low since leaving office, President George W. Bush has been thrust back into the spotlight of late, both with and without his consent. It […]
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Conservative Christians used their lobbying muscle to create a gaping loophole in health care reform’s individual mandate, reports Sarah Posner in the American Prospect. Members of so-called Health Care Sharing […]
The second week of Britain’s General Election campaign ended with many commentators – and even more voters – yawning and complaining that this is fast becoming the most boring General […]
“The laughter is unlike most settings you’ll find.The level of intensity, the adrenaline, the stakes are incredible.I mean, it is addictive.” As an actor and playwright, you might think John […]
If you have been reading the op-ed pages lately, you have begun to notice in the last week or so that a subtle change in their rhetoric is taking place. […]
Imagine how different your life would be if next Earth Day a year from now, you supplied the power to this computer—by pedaling, churning or dancing. The way these students […]
Yesterday, Facebook’s 25 year old co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to socialize the Web. You can now carry around your network of friends wherever you go in Cyberspace. Of course, how much you like the idea depends on if you like your identity and if you like your friends. Do you?
This week’s New Yorker contains extraordinary, and extremely moving, letters written by Saul Bellow to other novelists. Bellow was, for many critics and readers, primus inter pares in American twentieth […]
Admit it, skeptics, you were hoping this story was going to be about Uri Geller. I know I was. The Independent reports that Lebanese TV psychic Ali Sibat will not […]
New research finds that the movements of our bodies "influence the recollection of emotional memories, as well as the speed with which they are recalled."
A taxpayer-funded bar in the German city of Kiel caters to a very particular clientele: unemployed alcoholics. The bar aims to keep its patrons from disturbing other citizens during drinking binges.
The U.S. Treasury has unveiled a redesigned $100 bill, with new features "aimed at thwarting counterfeiters armed with ever-more sophisticated computers, scanners and color copiers."
There is a lot of evidence suggesting life exists on Mars, says astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch. "It’s actually more scientifically outrageous to think that Mars is and always has been sterile."
Plant breeders are offering hybrid heirloom tomatoes this year that they claim "have the distinct flavors and funky looks of heirlooms but are more disease-resistant and abundantly productive."
"The 'birther' myth is the political equivalent of a horror-movie villain: Not only does it refuse to die, but every time someone tries to kill it, it only comes back stronger," writes Christopher Beam.
"We may not know why we sleep, dream or wake up, but these states are never static," writes author Siri Hustvedt. There is a continuum of perception from unconsciousness to full self-consciousness.
"What if the Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud is "not just a minor volcanic hiccup, but the beginning of an event that causes in time a mass extinction of some form of earthbound life?" asks Simon Winchester.
"Combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, [play] is a central paradox of evolutionary biology,” writes anthropologist and neuroscientist Melvin Konner.
Women remain much choosier than men when it comes to dating. Is this difference a vestige of our early ancestry? Or could it be the result of something more modern and mundane?
This Monday marked the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma city bombing, an attack which killed 168 people and injured 680 more. As we know now (and as we were reminded […]
In his State of the Union address, President Obama said the Supreme Court had “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign […]
The first job my mother ever held involved plucking hundreds of dandelions by their tenacious little roots from her family’s tiny lawn. Her father had set her to the task, […]
The cover of this month’s issue of Fast Company has an excellent article by Anya Kamenetz on how smart phones are leading the charge in revolutionizing traditional methods of teaching and learning. […]
Is there anything we can do about the global increase in tropical storms? Ernst Weizsäcker, co-chair of the U.N.’s International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, thinks Hurricane Katrina may have […]
Has President Obama given up on being bipartisan? New Yorker editor David Remnick, author of the new Obama biography “The Bridge,” thinks that while the President’s political personality “aims toward […]
If you want to rile up a biologist and have no pointed stick handy, try this: Tell her that chemistry or physics are “harder,” more fundamentally “sciencey” sciences than hers. […]
Mark Twain was a great American novelist, but Nathanial Rich notes that in his own lifetime—which ended exactly a hundred years ago today—he was read more widely as a travel writer.
Researchers have found that bees see the world nearly five times as quickly as humans do, helping them to navigate through bushes and find food.
University authorities—seeing the distraction that the Internet and social media can cause—are trying a varied of methods to get students to turn off their computers in class.
"Individuals and businesses who are feeding a $700 million global market in offsets are often buying vague promises instead of the reductions in greenhouse gases they expect," writes Doug Struck.