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I’m the only one who can get you out of the situation that you’re in.

It’s France, 1785. An Englishman offers a surgeon money to perform a pretty standard operation: leg amputation. However, for the surgeon, there is no good medical reason to do so, […]

Just when you think you’ve gotten away from the so-called “grandmother cell,” it comes around again.  It’s the proverbial Whack-A-Mole in the neuroscience world.  No matter how many times the […]

Maybe it’s because I’m a product of post-sixties America, born into an anti-authoritarian culture of individual liberty and self-expression. Maybe it’s because I’m the rebellious son of a tough, Italian-American mother. But I’ve always had issues with discipline . . .

With Stephen Colbert on vacation this week, Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona seems to have jumped into the role of the laughable conservative who makes ridiculous arguments with a straight face — or, in this case, who tries to make worthwhile political science research sound ridiculous. 

A Q&A With Dr. John L. Casti, author, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything Dr. John L. Casti is a complexity scientist. This is one of those job descriptions I would […]

–Guest post by Nicole Federica, American University student. News reports tracking the obesity epidemic in the United States offer a range of possible explanations for the problem.  These include government […]

Christian Lorentzen makes an excellent point excellently: Tougher for the novelist are the tasks of rendering convincing characters across the class spectrum and capturing economic intricacies in a way that’s […]

I’d like to tell you why Rick Santorum’s extreme religious views should be blamed for hampering his campaign’s performance on Super Tuesday, but I don’t believe that to be true. […]

I suggested, although not as insistently as I should have, that February would be the month of Santorum. Well, it was. Santorum was so impressive that he was the non-Romney who came closest to winning.    

Our BIG THINKING friend, Robert de Neufville, wonders why more Republicans aren’t voting in the primaries.  His wondering, of course, is hopeful.  It must mean either that the ferocity of the […]

Art news always offers wonderful confluences that stir the imagination. The wonderful news that Paul Cézanne’s The Boy in the Red Waistcoat (detail shown above), which had been stolen by […]

Modern art takes itself much too seriously. Even the Pop artists often took the fun out of whatever they touched—a reverse Midas touch rendering even comedy gold into dross. Andy […]

We’ve reached an important inflection point in the development of the world.

BIG THINKER Robert de Neufville has said, quite correctly, that Romney is the favorite for the Republican nomination two weeks in a row.  But it’s a little misleading to say he […]

     There were a lot of thoughtful comments on my observations last week about the ethics of denying that climate change is real. Many felt that I was arrogant, since […]

Political candidates are jumping on the bandwagon of criticizing China for the US’ economic woes. But experts say this perception is distorted and dangerous. 

Our BIG THINKING friend Robert de Neufville is right to notice public opinion trending in favor of same-sex marriage.  And so it seems reasonable for him to predict that it […]

With SETI’s search for extraterrestrial life running on all cylinders again, two questions must be raised: How do we make contact? And how do we make meaningful contact? Big Think asked Bill Nye, aka, ‘The Science Guy,’ who heads The Planetary Society. 

As was so aptly said just a few days ago: It is hard to make an argument that there are many desirable post-secondary educational or career scenarios for current high […]

I’m not a big science fiction reader, but I admire how the genre has just enough of a toehold in reality that it feels plausibly weird. It stakes out the […]

The internet went crazy Sunday night after Black In America: The New Promised Land- Silicon Valley. Twitter, the place on the internet where the wired segment of Afro America goes […]

The Consumer Electronics Show is over and Mat Honan, senior reporter for Gizmodo.com, is depressed.   He wrote a lyrical piece about the  melancholia created by a three-day Bacchanalia of […]

I’d be remiss if I let 2011 slip by without a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), who was born a century ago and who now looms larger over contemporary poetry […]

–Guest post by Meng Shi, American University graduate student with contributions from Matthew Nisbet. Framing is a frequently used term that derives from several decades of research in the social […]

Today Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Swedish winner since 1974 and the first umlauted winner since Herta Müller in 2009. The citation mentions […]

It’s been over a month since the last MVP, so I thought it might be time to throw out another. Last time, Chris Reykjavik got the right answer – Kaula […]

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 […]

The key to managing change in the modern world is not having all of the answers, but rather being able to ask the right questions. 

As regular readers know, I’ve devoted considerable time to writing about the child-molestation scandal engulfing the Catholic church. The core of this story isn’t that there are child abusers within […]