Culture & Religion

Let’s face a sad truth: To be a book lover in the 21st century is a hard task. In the world of the knowledge economy and of constantly being plugged […]

How has Twitter changed the cultural and literary landscape aside from knowing what your friends had for lunch? For one thing, it has rescued the aphorism from our self-obsessed culture. 

Researchers are using powerful algorithms to analyze narrative accounts written by people using psychedelic drugs. They hope to better understand how the drugs work on the mind. 

Thanks to new discovery tools, pediatricians understand that storing and retrieving memory are two distinct brain functions. The latter develops later on and is unable to access your infant memories.

The future is mysterious, but not entirely. It is tangible in the promises that a person makes and in the unspoken responsibility one has to others. However much a person […]

The questions in this quiz are adaptations of items from research studies from the 1960s to the 1980s, initiated by Daniel Kahneman and his late research partner, Amos Tversky.

The stereotype of Sweden as a liberal utopia of robust sexual health was somewhat complicated recently in the American imagination by the biker gangs, neo-Nazis, and serial killers that populated […]

Researchers at an English university have created a robot that learns language like an infant. The achievement represents a major advance in the creation of artificial intelligence. 

The Mars rover Curiosity will be given more time to look for signs of life when it lands on the planet this summer thanks to NASA scientists’ ambition to better define the rover’s landing site. 

What is so special about touching a piano John Lennon once owned? Why do we yell at our laptops? What drove the Yankees to dig up the Red Sox jersey […]

More or less anybody who has ever done anything newsworthy can cite, as Henry Rollins can, some turning point at which they made a risky decision that paid off, and a lifelong sense of mission not easily derailed by minor failures. 

Human beings have the capacity to stop time. It is, in fact, a commonly used capacity. We use our ability to stop time as a bulwark against the threat of […]

Companies should go out of their way to hire new mothers because they are organized, they multitask, they have zero time to screw around and improve the culture of a workplace.

A coming age of neural implants and super-prosthetics should easily augment the natural capacities of the human body. The benefits will go to the disabled first, making them super-human. 

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the comments to my last post, “Are You A Paster, Presentist, Or Futurian?” Some readers proclaimed their temporal orientation with pride. Others shared insights into […]

Anecdotal evidence has long associated genius with mental instability but new neurological research suggests there is a solid biological reason why psychosis inspires creativity. 

Buying California Cabernet to share with your newborn on her 21st birthday?  You’re doing it wrong….

Even if we develop technologies that preserve our lives forever, we should still decline the offer, says metaphysician Stephen Cave. Meaningful lives require a time limit, he argues.

Much to the chagrin of musicians and critics alike, the best music does not always make it to the top of the charts. The market, however, does have a tendency to create an equilibrium. 

Critics say film director Wes Anderson has created the most distinct and identifiable cinematic world since Alfred Hitchcock. Anderson says its a team effort, led by long script-writing discussions. 

What’s the Big Idea? Our Lady of Lourdes appears 18 times to a miller’s daughter collecting firewood in a small market town in France. A young woman leads an army through […]

What’s the Big Idea? What does it mean to be connected in the 21st century? Hope, interdependence, and possibly the creation of a new consciousness, says Tiffany Shlain. Shlain is the […]

A little science-fiction philosophy to provoke you to remember on Memorial Day, courtesy of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit: Suppose you were given the chance to teleport yourself, Star Trek style, […]

The human “capacity for culture” and globalization have the potential to turn us into one culture. With the growing desire to learn about different cultures and the increasing want to travel around the world—it is like “we are machines capable of greater cooperation, inventiveness and common good on Earth.”

Some men–those who lack empathy and warmth–are better than others when it comes to picking up on visual cues that flag women as more willing to engage in casual sex. 

Following research on how humans express emotion through facial expressions, MIT scientists have created new computer software that understands human emotion better than we do. 

By mourning celebrity deaths online, we seek to display our specialness by association, say psychologists. The act also performs the important social function of building solidarity. 

A strong turnout at the New York Mets’ baseball stadium gave the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community an opportunity to address ‘serious family-related problems’ caused by the Internet. 

A unique history is what distinguishes one family from another, and knowing a family’s distinct set of stories is what binds the group together. While social media connects the larger society, genealogical work is what connects us to our own small group.

Instead of differentiating people on the basis of their “religion” (as Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc.), what if we differentiated people according to their temporal orientation? We could divide people into […]