Culture & Religion — April 4, 2011

Reality TV Is the Modern Equivalent of Freak Shows

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Snooki and crew are like the bearded ladies and the deformed of the Victorian era. The public has always been willing to pay a couple of cents to see something freakish, says Leigh.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

a man sitting in a wheel chair next to a laptop.

High Culture

Stephen Hawking’s famous voice belonged to this pioneering MIT scientist

Dennis Klatt developed trailblazing text-to-speech systems before losing his own voice to cancer.

A painting of a group of men examining a cadaver

The Past

Doctors needed corpses for dissection. So two men murdered people to provide them

“Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, and Knox the man who buys the beef.” Read the story of 19th-century Scotland’s corpse dealers.

Hard Science

The weird, dangerous, isolated life of the saturation diver

The divers spend their waking hours either under hundreds of feet of water on the ocean floor or squeezed into an area the size of a restaurant booth.

Two men engaging in a brain-teasing game at a table.

Neuropsych

Why your brain hates other people

And how to make it think differently.

Abstract image of hands reaching through a picture frame.

The Learning Curve

Hone your problem-solving skills down to a fine art — with fine art

By challenging your preconceptions, art offers a framework by which you can solve problems.

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