BIG THINKER Steven Mazie does well to criticize the complacency of Stephen Asma. Asma, citing obvious facts of evolutionary psychology, observes that our natural powers of knowing and loving are limited. […]
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“The owl of Minerva,” Hegel wrote, “takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” A year ago I launched Praxis as a forum for thinking reflectively about […]
In our current “War on Terror,” it’s sometimes hard to imagine or appreciate the terrors of times gone by. For Americans of the 19th century, stories of shipwrecks struck deep […]
Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts.
The past four human generations have seen their lifespans extended more than the preceding 8,000 generations, but what are the implications of living so much longer?
There are a lot of nightmare scenarios when it comes to the Middle East. Some of these are already visible on the horizon as the New York Times outlines in […]
Well, you can’t miss the new film Lincoln. Here’s the big reason: Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is pretty much WHO we will think of when imagining the person “Father Abraham” from now […]
How do we understand the rate of technological change and how can we develop the tools to best adapt to this change?
All throughout this year, I’ve been hearing people excitedly claiming that December 21, 2012, one week from today, will be the date of some major world event. Amusingly, the many […]
Five hundred years ago today, Michelangelo unveiled The Sistine Chapel Ceiling to Pope Julius II. The next day, All Saints’ Day 1512, the Pope inaugurated the newly decorated chapel with […]
For the third year running, here’s a very personal, very subjective, “I can’t read everything, so I probably left out something, so mention it in the comments, OK?” list of […]
In September of 1965, Life magazine ran a piece on medicine’s “astonishing” and “audacious experiments” that might even promise a “kind of immortality.” The first article dealt with reproduction. The […]
With Easter and Passover on the minds of so many millions of Christians and Jews this weekend, so are the deeper themes of renewal, promise, and liberation that these religious […]
Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go around it. Gotta go through it. Many generations will remember with affection growing up singing the song above. This generation […]
For those of us who are committed to creating a better world how do we respond to the evil and heinous acts of our violent past? I just got back […]
In addition to all the glitz and the glam, Hart Dyke’s seen and painted the very real danger of being in Her Majesty’s Secret Service and looked upon the real face of James Bond.
Channeling innovation and propelling yourself onto the path to success is easier said than done. So how do you create an environment that’s ripe for innovation?
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
Those windshields with embedded displays may be here sooner than you think: A team of Rice University researchers has come up with flexible high-capacity memory chips made of silicon oxide and graphene.
Editor’s Note: Today I’m thrilled to have a guest post by Adam Baron, an excellent journalist, who is working and writing from Yemen. Today, he wrote a must-read story on […]
Ever feel sorry for a sidewalk sparrow with a cigarette butt in its beak? Did you sigh in wistful sadness at seeing nature’s beauty polluted by human industry, which turns […]
The barrier for autistic people is not about intelligence but the ability to communicate. Technology has opened that door today and helped reframe our perception.
We have a background assumption that we are living in a technologically-accelerating civilization. Peter Thiel has a different view of where we are headed, and he says we need to fight hard to improve our future prospects.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]
Imagine if nude women in fashion magazines, action movies, and music videos, suddenly screamed out against political corruption, debilitating income inequality, or oppression by religious leaders. Femen, a group of […]
Mark 2012 down as the year that we finally saw traditional political polls for what they are – a form of voodoo black magic mixed with Machiavellian pseudoscience. With only 10 […]
Our prehistoric ancestors are the ones who did the heavy mental lifting for which we owe our expanded frontal cortexes. So who has the right brain for today?
After all the votes were cast and counted and even Florida reached a conclusion, the election postmortem flew fast and furious and will continue to whirl until the 2016 presidential […]
A year ago Mike Konczal noticed something stunning about the stories on the We Are the 99% Tumblr: The people in them don’t sound like late 20th century consumers who […]