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You cannot prevent weapons by preventing technologies. We just have to use them carefully, particularly the power of genetics. 

Ramez Naam looks at the power of innovation to overcome natural resource and environmental challenges.

Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with the credit system […]

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.—Alan Watts Yesterday the NY Times published an article about the importance of play in the evolutionary development […]

For the most part, your chances of success in life are a function of the circumstances of your birth.

As a follow-up to my earlier post about the mission creep of sexual objectification into places where it just doesn’t belong, here are two more examples. I could write a […]

Tyrants are undone and liberty is won with a good question. We need to build this capacity in ourselves and the people around us. 

One of the problems in the contemporary neuro-scientific study of consciousness is really a basic fundamental one, which is that we’ve been looking for consciousness in the wrong place.  We’ve […]

With strikes in American nerve centers such as New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, and even Las Vegas, one artist this summer is waging a one-man World War Z of […]

What big data means is we are able to learn things about ourselves at the population level, at a huge scale, that we never could in the past.

On May 24, 1813, just months after publishing Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen went to a show in search of her female hero. ”I dare say Mrs. D[arcy] will be […]

Have you noticed how women in almost every professional field today are subjected to a hotness rating? Here’s a rating of the sexiness of women in academically elite colleges. Then […]

Reverse innovation is not about giving yesterday’s technology; it is not about giving cheap products.  It’s about giving value because poor people want value.

“Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.” –William Deresiewicz Imagine you are a painter […]

You spend a lot of time talking about sharing and alternatives to ownership when your child’s in preschool. In the morning story circle you don’t want to be an avaricious, […]

I wrote an article inHarvard Business Review asking why can’t we build a $300 house? Now, why do you need a $300 house?  Just let us look at a simple […]

Modernism first moved on May 29, 1913. That’s century-old hyperbole, of course, but if any date achieves day of infamy status for modern art in the 20th century, it’s the […]

“I’m a storyteller at heart,” Star Wars mastermind George Lucas says at the beginning of his proposal for a new museum to be built on the grounds of San Francisco’s […]

America’s nuclear waste is all dressed up in dry cask storage, with nowhere to go. In 1987, the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was designated as a “deep geologic dispersal” site for […]

Thankfully, several women’s organizations have started a campaign to have advertisers pull their dollars from Facebook until it gets over its misogyny and rape love. There’s a link to some […]

It is believed that the first war-related photographs were taken in 1847 by an anonymous photographer during the Mexican–American War, of which we “Remember the Alamo” and little else. But […]

Every teacher is obligated to devote teaching time to direct test prep. 

            When you think of social media, the first thing that comes to mind is probably Facebook. That’s no surprise considering that as of April […]

One reason to have a liberal education—one that’s usually neglected by all those experts these days who are saying that the value of an education is measured by the money […]

Before the end of the Second World War, officials from the Allied nations met up at a resort town in New Hampshire to create a new economic order for the […]

Shepard Fairey’s aesthetic, which has so much to do with appropriating and re-imagining images — is best understood through the lens of his many colorful influences.

There’s a popular myth in the American yoga community that Indian vegetarianism began as a spiritual response to humanity’s place in the cosmos. The concept of ahimsa, or non-violence, is […]

How can a uniquely Shakespearean habit of mind can be applied to our own lives in order to help us think more creatively?

Kate Losse reviewed Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In unfavorably in Dissent. For this reason, her publicist tweeted that Losse is going to “a special place in hell,” reserved for women who […]

We imagine our view of the world like a painting from the Realism movement – rife with detail and comprehensible – but the contents of our conscious mind are more […]