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I’m going to be frank with you: parts of the book are an exhausting experience. “Boring” is the wrong word, but this is not a “fun” classic nineteenth-century American novel. This is a feat of endurance, captain.

It’s just willful silliness to argue that questions about how much of “our money” the government can take is logically incoherent. 

The United States is following its peer nations in Western Europe and is projected to become a majority unmarried and “post-marriage” nation within the decade, according to research released this […]

Continuing a tradition I started last year, 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?” […]

Oh how I wish David Foster Wallace had been my English professor. The University of Texas has recently posted the syllabus from the English 102 class he taught at Pomona […]

Grosset & Dunlap/Price Stern Sloan President and Publisher Francesco Sedita had a meeting with his entire team of editors, art directors and designers recently. The subject? A mustache. “We’ve been […]

If you’re a “true freelancer,” someone who freelances because they can’t stand to work any other way, you must honor your “true freelancer” nature and do it your own way.

Virtual schooling is a good idea. Over the past decade or so, online education has proven itself a valuable component of the learning system, from elementary to post-secondary. I personally […]

As a film critic, it was unlikely that Roger Ebert’s life would read like a movie script. But it has. Surviving and overcoming personal obstacles has showed him the value of life beyond the cinema. 

Unemployment among those aged 16-29 is at its highest rate since WWII. “Follow your passion,” while hard to argue with, is clearly an inadequate career plan.

Writer Tauriq Moosa argues that our objections to necrophilia come down to primal disgust, and that most ethical arguments against are logically untenable. 

Craig Robinson, a conservative blogger who runs The Iowa Republican, didn’t mince words last week, calling Herman Cain a liar who is not willing to take responsibility for his actions. […]

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 […]

Steve Jobs’ death yesterday unloosed a torrent of well-deserved encomia to the man and his genius. Jobs’ abundant talents as an engineer, designer, and capitalist are beyond dispute. But did […]

Whatever the facts of the crimes in this week’s pair of institutional scandals (and it bears saying that trials in the Afghanistan “kill team” case are ongoing, while Jerry Sandusky […]

EVEN President George Bush played lip service to the idea of a ‘two State’ solution for Israel/Palestine. That, after all, is the default position of the international community. It is […]

Friends sometimes ask me about the signs of marriages on the brink. Can mere mortals, without credentials even!, predict which marriages are likely to divorce? It makes for a fascinating […]

It is remarkably easy to report false-positive findings, or results that support an effect that, in reality, does not (or may not) exist.

When Frank Bruni was hired as an op/ed columnist for the New York Times, I doubted that he was qualified. His latest column puts those doubts to rest. Bruni is […]

In the last fifty years, a remarkable sea change has taken place in the field of astronomy: Life, once considered unfathomably rare, is now thought likely to exist elsewhere. 

Former Prime Minister, Tony Blair and former UK Foreign Secretaries Jack Straw and David Miliband, now face some extremely tough questions as to how much they knew about the extraordinary […]

Guest Post by Jenna Le. Jenna Le has worked as a physician in Queens and the Bronx, New York City. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Six Rivers, was published by New York […]

Why does anything exist at all? The idea that the universe simply appeared out of nothing is difficult enough; trying to conceive of nothingness is perhaps even harder.

Carl Sagan describes the so-called “Drake Equation,” named after Frank Drake of Cornell, in the program Cosmos, episode 12 “The Encyclopaedia Galactica.” The Drake Equation is used to calculate the […]

Now that New York’s state Senate has approved gay marriage, how will the health of the LGBT community be affected? Take the good with the bad, says a Columbia Law School professor. 

In a recently published book chapter, my colleague Lauren Feldman and I review the major areas of research on how media and campaigns influence public judgments and knowledge.  We also […]

Slate’s resident advice columnist recently printed a letter from an adult child with a very unusual problem: Dear Prudence, My mother died a decade ago; neither she nor my father […]

Britain’s Opposition leader, Ed Miliband has emerged from two national crises with flying colours. He may have been a little late coming to the first – the Murdoch hacking scandal – but […]

Following Julian Sanchez‘s lead, I’ve argued that now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns — rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage […]

Tonight’s Republican Presidential Debate at Dartmouth College will feature a pre-debate panel discussion, exclusively co-sponsored by Big Think and Dartmouth College. This discussion will stream LIVE right here at 5pm […]