Culture & Religion

The Electoral College system is anachronistic, disillusioning, and unpopular. Here’s a better plan.   

We can all rattle off a few Greek philosophers to win a trivia prize, but how many Golden Age philosophers are you familiar with? Here’s a primer.

Electronics factory workers in Shenzen have a their own manufacturing scene going at night.

Two sonic branding experts offer commentary on the sound designs that punctuate our days.

Spontaneous talk on surprise topics. The voluble Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on why tolerance is the wrong way to deal with terrorism, the refugee crisis, and all the other problems we face. 

Through a series of election-related email dumps, WikiLeaks played a major role in the U.S. elections.

How far are you willing to trust technology? Make a call, share a photo, find a good restaurant, pay a bill, vacuum the floor? But, will you trust autonomous systems with your life and the life others? Autonomous vehicles will be making decisions for us at 60mph and more — the question facing us may no longer be technological but social. How much do you trust a robot?

The Dalai Lama suggests the anger tearing apart nations is a feeling many have of not being needed any more.

The device will deliver results in just 15 minutes.  

A long-lost interview with the BBC host Ruby Wax shows Donald Trump appear to intimidate her.

Spontaneous, deep talk on surprise topics. Historian and New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb on interspecies ethics, the limits of civil discourse, and mathematical symmetry as the defining principle of the universe.   

As John B Judis writes in The Populist Explosion, this sort of uprising has been with us for years.

Physicists discover strikingly similar structures in human cells and neutron stars.

The DOOR CLOSE button on your elevator is there only to make you feel better since it doesn’t actually work.

Yes, climate change movies are sad and often lead to quiet desperation, but here’s why we should continue watching and acting.

The FBI’s “face recognition unit” was overwhelmingly made up of “non-criminal entries,” Georgetown researchers found.    

Dreams are not rational, neither are fantasy novels and comic books and yet they’re immensely valuable in processing our thoughts, feelings and moral quandaries. Does Tarot do the same?

Anti-Islam fervor has overlooked important artistic contributions made by Muslim artists around the world. 

Programmers at MIT publish A.I.-generated scary images scary for Halloween.

A new book finds that Hitler relied on a number of drugs to rule Germany, including “crystal meth.”   

When companies hide algorithms from public view, the data are used for destructive purposes, warns Cathy O’Neil in her new book.

In ‘All the Real Indians Died Off,’ two scholars take longstanding myths about Native Americans to task.

Mark Zuckerberg insists the future of virtual reality will put “people first.” The development trajectory of the technology tells another story. 

If Will Allen’s documentary, Holy Hell, teaches us one thing, it’s that there’s no easy answer.

Who was the father of American photojournalism? Here’s a look at the Civil War work of Mathew Brady.

Our inherent response mechanisms were programmed long ago; implicit biases are reactionary, volatile, largely under the radar of conscious awareness. They do not imply blanket racism.

Bees help pollenate much of our crops. Without them, the food supply is doomed.   

Some fear we are meddling with forces too powerful for human control.  

Creepy clowns are everywhere, but why do we find clowns so creepy in the first place? New research into creepiness confirms what we all thought: clowns are objectively creepy.

New research reveals the logic behind murder in old Icelandic Viking settlements.