Consumption of marijuana should be legal, but selling it should not be. Mark Kleiman at The Atlantic fears marketers would peddle the vice just as they have alcohol and fast food.
Search Results
You searched for: genius
Bill Maher’s mockumentary Religulous opens in theaters on Friday. Judging by Maher’s media interviews, it’s more of the same type of sophomoric ridicule that has been so self-defeating to the […]
Talk about hubris… Dirty trickster James O’Keefe’s foray into gonzo porn has ended disastrously for him. O’Keefe schemed to seduce CNN investigative reporter Abbie Boudreau in front of hidden cameras. […]
Is there a truly “revolutionary” element in the current surge of anger in American politics? What is the place of madness and irrationality in revolution? If we want to speak […]
Mark McKinnon was the genius behind Bush’s 2004 media strategy. The Bush campaign successfully portrayed Bush as “a strong leader in a time of change” while redefining Kerry as “weak, […]
Google, whose genius was born in the search engine, is now looking at itself from beyond the grave. CEO Erich Schmidt is preparing his company for the next round of […]
In a guest post today, AoE culture correspondent Patrick Riley takes a look at the efforts by James McCartney and other Beatles offspring to escape the celebrity penumbra of their […]
“It seems fair to conclude that the 81-year-old, Canadian-born [Frank] Gehry is the most important architect of our age,” writes Matt Tyrnauer.
William James was about the only philosopher who didn’t end up a pettifogging nit-picker or overbearing egomaniac with delusions of genius. So says New Humanist’s Jonathan Rée.
When we think of Sigmund Freud, we think first of words—the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis, books such as The Interpretation of Dreams, and the infamous Freudian slip. In Mirrors of […]
The word genius tends to get thrown around pretty liberally these days, especially when everyone from Bob Dylan to Mike Myers has been tagged with the superlative. But in an […]
One of the most wonderful things about the emerging global superbrain is that information is overflowing on a scale beyond what we can wrap our heads around.
Garrison Keillor on the myth of merit: “I was brought up imagining that cream rises to the top, merit wins out, the race is to the swift and riches to men of understanding, but it ain’t necessarily so.”
nn PERTINI DANCE (by S.C.O.R.T.A., 1984) n “What a superstar to be, is the best you can see. n Yes this is a brave man, oh. The first Italian man, […]
Nobel-Prize winning physicist William Phillips admits that “laser cooling” is a somewhat confusing concept. How can light energy, generally thought of as a source of heat, be used to cool […]
Science fiction writer Catherine Asaro is also a ballet dancer and a math teacher who believes thatphysics and dancing are much more closely related than you might think
I just love allegorical maps like these, if only for their delightfully straightforward semiotics. This map of the Road to Success depicts an actual road, winding up to success signified […]
Who decides what “insane” means? This was the major question of Ken Kesey’s countercultural classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which illustrated how mental illness could be deployed by […]
“The main argument here is that pleasure is deep,” Paul Bloom writes early on in his new book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We […]
The New York Times cover story on John Updike’s archives reveals a writer who took care to develop and preserve his literary legacy. While an instinct for careful self-preservation is […]
As genetic research advances, the risk of attributing too many qualities, such as genius, to our genes dangerously downplays individual potential for achievement.
Chiwetel Ejiofor as geologist Adrian Helmsley in last year’s blockbuster 2012 is one of the many emerging “hero” images of scientists in popular film and television.In graduate school, I published […]
Today marks the first installment of Big Think’s newest series, “Moments of Genius,” sponsored by Intel. We sat down with math and science thought leaders—from the inventor of the very […]
Catherine Asaro, the bestselling science-fiction author, uses concepts from physics and math to inform the fantastical stories of her characters. In a recent interview with Big Think, Asaro describes how […]
When Jill Tarter was growing up, she remembers walking along the beach with her father, gazing up at the night sky. Well before she would become a leader in the […]
A new book examines the lives of the Romantic poets in their well-intentioned but ultimately ambiguous morality. It is a case of life imitating art, writes Laura Miller for Slate.
We live in an intriguing era of self-disclosure. Tonight, in New York City, the World Science Festival features a panel discussion called Strangers in the Mirror: “What’s it like to […]
Leonardo da Vinci didn’t invent the sfumato technique, which produced the “smoky” effects of masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa, but he may have perfected it. For centuries, art experts […]
A curious map from Alfred Russel Wallace, the father of biogeography