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Over the Holiday break, I read Walter Isaacson’s masterful and absorbing biography of Steve Jobs.  As his biography reveals, Jobs was a dark, complex and often deeply contradictory figure. “There […]

Guest post by Samantha Eliza Benten The Law of Non-Contradiction, as stated by Aristotle: “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same […]

Sleeping under your desk, eating food in bar form, dreading once-pleasant social diversions. If this is what it takes to start a new company, is it worth it? Are you being made a slave?

The Amwell Township of western Pennsylvania sits on one of the world’s largest natural gas reserves. But are the political benefits of mining natural gas worth the human costs?

Over at Republican Narrative Central the high priests of political mischief need to take Frank Luntz off speaker this afternoon and spend some time on Twitter instead. #40dollars, the hashtag […]

Read the recap of Day 1 here. Day 2! I have to admit I missed the first talk of the day by Joe Nickell (see my previous post about goings-on […]

As the assault of comic book superhero-featuring movies over the past few years attests, the men and women in tights serve today as the closest thing American culture has to […]

The extra dimension of time embedded in each photo we see this holiday season reminds us of how fleeting each moment truly is. 

Many of the cognitive tools (heuristics and biases) that we use for all sorts of decision-making also influence our choices about risk.

The same basic impulses – insatiable curiosity, good people skills, an appetite for risk – that led Kevin Mitnick into a decade-long game of cat-and-mouse with the FBI are richly rewarded in more prosocial professions.

 

You’ve probably had this experience thousands of times. You’re Googling, and you start typing in a question.  Google, like a jittery, over-zealous waiter, fills in the blank for you. Google […]

Former New York Times Ethicist Randy Cohen tackles the ethics of asymmetrical relationships.

Gossip: you can’t avoid it. And maybe, you shouldn’t want to. Scientists have argued that gossip is an important tool for social cohesion and information transmission, allowing us to function […]

John Boehner’s budget proposal would cause the greatest increase in poverty in U.S. history, according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: House Speaker John Boehner’s […]

Why didn’t humans become as peaceful as we are today tens of thousands of years ago?

At the time of his arrest by the FBI in 1995, Kevin Mitnick was the most wanted hacker in America. Today Kevin continues his hacking adventures legally, as a computer security expert.

Facebook has the Like button. Google has +1. Now, Wikipedia is getting a Love button. Its goal is to create a community of support around its many editors who are facing difficulties. 

Stewart Brand’s famous maxim, “Information Wants to be Free,” has been, for more than 25 years, one of the most popular rallying cries of the Digital Age. These words have […]

Everybody, meet Kergolus. This little furry thing is a geo-mascot, shaped like the territory it symbolises. Top marks if you’re able to guess which territory that is, either by the […]

With e-books now outselling print titles on Amazon.com, the book business is undergoing its most radical transformation in living memory. Everyone and their literate cat has an opinion about what the […]

It’s not Dr. Seuss. But Go the F*** to Sleep is extremely powerful, and it’s extremely powerful for an audience who has supported and stomached and loved and memorized-to-the-point-of-loving-slightly-less the […]

A kind of religion has developed around so-called “natural” foods. Hold on, says modernist chef and inventer Nathan Myhrvold. Do you like muffins? Do you like wine and cheese? If so, read on.

On June 14, the day designated as Titanic Takeover Tuesday, a group of hackers known as LulzSec took down the website of the CIA, hacked into 62,000 email accounts and […]

            A special task force is about to report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about whether America’s 104 nuclear reactors could handle the challenges that led to partial meltdowns at […]

On average, a brain’s short term memory can only hold between five and seven pieces of information at a time. Can steps be taken to expand the capacity of our memory—and our brains generally?

In a country referred to as “the worst place to be a child”, for five years now, Abraham “Abramz” Tekya has been using hip hop and breakdance to empower, rehabilitate, […]

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is one of the most famous novels ever written about combat, in general and in the American Civil War, where the book is […]

People have been thinking strategically forever, but game theory as a real science dates back less than 100 years to the mathematician Joseph von Neumann.

Attempting to explain quantum theory, physicist Erwin Schrodinger proposed an experiment almost 80 years ago that would send PETA into a frenzy.