Culture & Religion

The media has speculated that Arizona gunman Jared Loughner’s heavy use of marijuana could be behind his psychotic behavior. Forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone looks at the science behind this claim.

Taste is both a sense and a preference; a gustatory pleasure and a social inquiry of what’s beautiful, proper, unique and stylish. What is taste on a neurological level and […]

Food writer Adam Gopnik travels from the White House kitchen to the famed elBulli restaurant in Catalonia, Spain and finds that savory flavors are the new fad in desserts.

While it’s established that polygamy can be a source of oppression for women, to over-simplify and construe it as necessarily generating abuse is unproductive.

The cognitive revolution of the past 30 years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason.

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.

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.

Despite being considered one of the greatest American novels, “Huckleberry Finn” is the fourth most banned book in U.S. schools. Now the N-word is being removed by one publisher.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will preside over a hearing to determine if Shakespeare’s Hamlet would be mentally competent to stand trial in today’s courts.

Young Muslim women are often forced to lead double lives in Europe. They have sex in public restrooms and stuff mobile phones in their bras to hide their secret existences.

English is in a constant state of flux. New words are formed and old ones fall into disuse. But no trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing of nouns into verbs.

The images, messages and stories of the multibillion-dollar pornography industry have seeped into and distorted our genuine sexual identities, says The Guardian’s Gail Dines.

Mood rings famously are meant to change color to reflect the mood of the wearer. Some are cheap and ugly. Some are expensive and set in precious metal. All work using the same mechanics.

Men and women may be more similar to each other than we think—the process of sex determination is not over by birth, but continues into life, up to and including puberty.

Another important thing to remember when raising money for charity, or engineering any sort of grassroots movement for that matter, is that the key to men and women’s hearts (and […]

“The world doesn’t matter to us the way it used to,” say two philosophers who have written a book about the loss of traditional meaning in contemporary secular culture.

Frank Furedi takes to task Tariq Ramadan, “who wants to bury the Enlightenment virtue of toleration and replace it with recognition.” Can we seek meaning without a capacity to judge?

What would Michel de Montaigne, the French author commonly credited with inventing the essay, think of the custom of making new year resolutions?

Misal embodies the type of person who will truly transform India: not an engineer or a financier, but an average person who refuses to be satisfied with the status he was born to.

Every fad has its golden window, the period between Wow and Enough already. So it is with flash mobs, those hit-and-run performances that keep springing up.

“When we learn to tolerate boredom, we find out who we really are,” said one speaker at a recent conference on boredom who lamented our over-stimulated culture.

Nearly two centuries after Tocqueville, both fear and hope still brood over the puzzle of America’s innermost nature, and America’s influence on the wider world.

Richard Dawkins on his lifelong love of the King James Bible, which will be 400 years old next year: “Everyday speech is laced with biblical phrases from quotation to cliché.”

What is wrong with Broadway? A record number of shows are closing, with producers millions in the hole. The answer is: nothing we didn’t already know.

Was Hopper an ugly American, so wedded to simplistic imagery that the finer points of Cubism or abstract painting went over his head? Did he rely on cliché because that was all he understood?

Kwanzaa was conjured up in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, then chair of the black studies department at California State to “reaffirm and restore our rootedness in African culture.”

Christmas is one night that is allowed to rip itself from the continuum and to exist all on its own, a mystery and damnation to all the clocks ticking away below.

We can all simplify our traditions and distill our expectations to their essence: a time of joy and peace. Adele Stan says she found the true meaning of Christmas by not celebrating it.

Anosognosia is an intriguing neuropsychological syndrome in which a patient with one or more paralysed limbs denies they have anything wrong with them. A form of Freudian defense?

Top writers—from Salman Rushdie to John Irving to Margaret Atwood to Bret Easton Ellis—talk about inspiration, the discipline of writing, and how to create memorable characters.