Update 11/4: A few hours after I published this post, Mayor Bloomberg decided to cancel the marathon for the reason I develop below. See my analysis of Bloomberg’s surprising last-minute […]
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The “Defense of Marriage Act” is going to get a Supreme Court hearing soon, and in Maryland, same-sex marriage is being put to a referendum on November 6. There is […]
A nonprofit dedicated to researching the science and technology needed to travel vast distances across the cosmos says lasers can be used to harvest antimatter from the vacuum of space.
Once Roy Lichtenstein started painting Ben-Day dots in 1961, could he ever stop? After a tour of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, you […]
This is part 2 of my review of Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. Read Part 1 here. The most famous human being of prehistoric times is probably […]
There’s an indelible story in Jim Collins’ Good to Great about Admiral Jim Stockdale, a war hero who survived torture as a POW in Vietnam. From Collins’ book: “I never […]
DARPA’s 100-Year Starship Initiative aims to make human space travel beyond our solar system possible within 100 years.
This article was originally published on AlterNet. What kind of world would we have if a majority of the human race was atheist? To hear religious apologists tell it, the […]
Anxiety rates have risen in our country for the last four decades. Sociologists blame the increased number of choices we have and the failure of the mythical American meritocracy.
Mark Rothko only got as far as his sophomore year at Yale before fleeing that WASP nest of anti-Semitism and elitism. Forty-six years later, Yale awarded him an honorary degree […]
While discovering the Higgs particle would bode well for the validity of the Standard Model, there are still lingering questions which the Large Hadron Collider has yet to find answers to.
This semester when college students return to campus at America’s leading universities, they may be surprised to find out that the men and women teaching them subjects like Machine Learning or Listening to […]
Dear Paris Hilton You probably don’t remember me. We met briefly once, years ago. It was when you bought a book on numerology and astrology from a store I worked […]
Drew Nelles has written a fascinating article detailing our species’ history of tackling “criminal activity” of animals. Today, we commonly hear of everyday stories of dangerous animals being “put down”. […]
In June of this year, you can see Venus pass across the surface of the sun. The event, which will not occur again until 2117, will help planet hunters to find foreign worlds similar to Earth.
What do you get for being a governor who cuts $860 million from his state’s education budget and forces schools to slash their arts education? A Lifetime Achievement Award for […]
Watching the London Olympics, I can’t help but marvel at the dedication the athletes have exhibited to compete on their sport’s biggest stage. For most of these men and women, […]
So, a few of you have asked, why have you stopped talking about movies? It’s not that I’ve stopped seeing them. The truth is that movies have gotten so much […]
We all have something about the world we want to see changed in our lifetimes. Here’s how you can go about doing it, starting today.
When painter Andrew Wyeth passed away in 2009, the reclusive painter took many of the secrets behind his art to the grave. When I heard that the Brandywine River Museum […]
[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from October 2007.] I recently received an e-mail which asked me if […]
Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon can take off at a moment’s notice and escape from pursuers into space. And can land on almost any patch of ground. Why can’t we do that in 2012? The problem is the puny power of the chemical rocket.
Last month, AlterNet published a column by James Rohrer, a history professor and self-identified progressive religious believer who had some unkind words for the New Atheists. I’d like to take […]
A few days ago, Ramesh Ponnuru made an interesting case for a massive U.S. tax break for childrearing—not a piddly deduction, but a honking big $5,000-per-kid credit. His reasoning (to […]
The next housing boom will be far more radical than the last housing boom. Instead of moving middle-class families into McMansions they can’t possibly afford, this next housing boom will […]
This post was originally written for the “Because I Am An Atheist” series at The Crommunist Manifesto. Thanks to Crommunist for the inspiration! Because I am an atheist, I don’t […]
The big news this week is that the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator at the European physics lab CERN, has apparently discovered the elusive and long-sought subatomic particle […]
I was thinking of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who is now trying for a political comeback, while driving home from New Haven, listening to a blues hour out of a […]
Certain cognitive tests that improve attention and working memory have been shown to increase people’s IQ scores, once considered a fixed measure of how smart someone is.
“Danger: Art Inside,” read the labels on the crated sculptures as I toured last month the almost-ready-for-public-viewing, but now restored, reinstalled, and reinterpreted Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The signs […]