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In my previous post, I quoted the letter I wrote to John Buehrens, Unitarian Universalist minister, to ask if he stood behind the anti-atheist denunciations in his book A Chosen […]

I served on a panel, Education in a Digital World, at the Iowa Education Summit today. Here is what I said during my 5 minutes of opening remarks. Good afternoon, We have to […]

These words describe love, desire, and relationships that have no real English translation but they capture subtle realities that even English speakers have felt once or twice.

One calculation puts China’s sovereign debt at 150 percent of its G.D.P., a bigger percentage than Greece’s. As China is buying up more European debt, could it be at risk of defaulting?

During his lifetime, Diego Rivera stood as one of the most important and controversial artists in the world. Today, thanks to the international feminist phenomenon of Frida Kahlo (who stood […]

— Guest post by Luis Hestres, American University doctoral student. To say that new information technologies are revolutionizing political activism has become a tried and true cliché. It also happens […]

So TRAVEL AND LEISURE has ranked the place where I teach eighth in the nation in terms of beauty.  That’s news, of course, to those who have the leisure to travel […]

Making art, says Singer-Songwriter Josh Ritter, is half of the artist’s job. The rest is hustling on its behalf – making sure the world hears it. (Exclusive, in-studio performance at the end of the article)

The field of psychology appears to be way overinvested in lab studies and strikingly underinvested in field studies. Should researchers get out in the real world more?

So this post is, first of all, a piece of shameless self-promotion.  I’m the editor of the best journal in political philosophy and the related fields—Perspectives on Political Science.  The most […]

A new milk carton-size printer developed by the Vienna University of Technology may allow users to download and print anything from earrings to replacement machine parts to silverware.

“Women are conflicted in ten different directions today,” “Shirin” tells me. She’s an accomplished, unmarried woman in her 40s, living in Los Angeles.  She continues, “They know you cannot have […]

Neuropsychiatry now not only better understands psychological resilience, but how to improve it. That’s good news for anyone coping with stress, not just those with disorders.

My previous post, “The Blinding Fog of Religious Moderation“, drew some criticism from people who felt that I was unjustly lumping moderate believers together with fundamentalists. So, in this post, […]

According to Princeton Neuroscientist Sam Wang, co-author with Sandra Aamodt of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain, the benefits of bilingualism go far beyond the ability to order convincingly at Maxim’s in Paris, or to read Dostoevsky in the original.

I debated the excellent libertarian author Ronald Bailey over this question at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.  Ron has already responded to me here.  Before I respond to him, I thought […]

“Life,” my brother-in-law tells me, “is 90 percent maintenance.” I’ve no complaints about my husband’s chore contribution in our marriage. Our “dreariness index” as I call it seems fair enough. […]

Like many urban rivers, the South Platte in Denver is not always easy to get to. City officials have done a fair job of creating walking and biking paths along […]

To be fair, Dan Savage wasn’t talking to me. I was just listening in on this fight he’s having with some people he calls the “monogamusts.” I think a monogamust […]

Two prominent tobacco researchers have argued against adopting a “well-meaning” health policy that would see adult movie ratings in the U.S. for films with on-screen smoking.

This serious and thoughtful—and maybe great—film is quite the labor of love.  It’s a film about broken families and broken lives made by the father-and-son team of Martin Sheen and Emilio […]

Allen Ginsberg, you fearless old goat, you shrewd, batshit agitator, you hedonist Buddhist, where are you now? Following Occupy Wall Street in the news has made me want to invoke […]

So BIG THINK reports a study that shows that social networking stimulates generosity.   Here’s how:  Rather than be shunned by one’s fellow generous networkers or “friends” (as in Facebook friends), […]

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 […]

Thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s request for thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes series that has taken up the blog for the last few weeks. I was surprised […]

We need to double down on collective leadership in both the public and private sectors. It’s the only way to make things work in what many would call our broken society – a society in which people (whether they’re employees or voters) desperately yearn for competence at the top.

When President Obama asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates to stay at his post, Gates made clear he would do so out of a sense of public duty, not an affinity for Washington D.C.

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Churches Of Cain And Obama” attempts to explain the philosophical differences between these two men by examining the teachings of their […]

The way our brains act, it seems, is sensitive to the way we, their owners, think, from something as concrete to learning, the subject of the current study, to something as theoretical as free will.

OMG. I better tweet this. Or post it on Facebook. Or click that oh-so-tempting like button. Maybe tumblr? Stumbleupon? Some other sharing service that I’m too slow to have noted, […]