Far from simply being a relaxed state, meditation is a period of heightened mental activity. Long-term practice can increase one’s capacity for attention as well as compassion.
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Psychiatrist Norman Doidge, author of “The Brain That Changes Itself,” discusses how neuroplasticity can be hijacked by an addition to pornography.
Los Angeles often feels like another planet to non-natives, from the confluence of cultures to the often unearthly architecture. In Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970, Thomas S. […]
In a new campaign advertisement (above), Senator John McCain focuses on global warming, framing his position as a pragmatic “middle way” approach between the two extremes of denying there is […]
Is financial illiteracy “rational ignorance”—inattention that is justified because the costs of paying attention outweigh the benefits? The New Yorker says no.
When I was a kid, I found myself glued to the television whenever a moon landing took place. Even when others grew jaded by repeated landings, I never lost sight […]
Has the rise of celebrity architects over the past couple of decades been good or bad for the design of buildings, generally? New Yorker architecture critic Paul Golberger says that […]
Queen Elizabeth II is here, and today she spoke about peace. She said, in her speech at the United Nations, “the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership […]
New photographs in which Allen Ginsberg captured his fellow Beats—Kerouac, Corso, and himself—have been unearthed by scholars, enriching the American Beat catalog.
A lifetime ban on donating blood for men who have slept with other men, created to protect recipients from HIV, is being challenged as outdated and unfair by two Canadian physicians.
Almost 200 years later, you still have to just be awestruck by the magnitude of the “Great Eruption” of Tambora that produced the “Years without a Summer”.
Harvard University economics professor Jeffrey Miron thinks all drugs—including heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and LSD—should be made legal and widely available.
If you think that a thumbs up in ancient Rome meant that the beaten gladiator would live and that a thumbs down meant death, you can thank Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1872 […]
When you hear the name Edvard Munch, you almost immediately think of The Scream. It’s unavoidable. Even during his lifetime, Munch found himself linked to that image and a select […]
To spare the feelings of the good people of his hometown, Sinclair Lewis invented a fictional state as the setting for his novels
“There is certainly some strange power that has some overlook on me & directing my life,” Winslow Homer wrote in a letter to his brother late in his life. “That […]
The English philosopher Andrew Flew who argued for the existence of God after a lifetime of atheism has died at the age of 87.
Time to get the answers to your questions for Sally Kuhn Sennert of the Global Volcanism Program.
Mark Twain was a great American novelist, but Nathanial Rich notes that in his own lifetime—which ended exactly a hundred years ago today—he was read more widely as a travel writer.
There was a philosopher once who had no patience with geekish hype about information technology. This application, he wrote, would never make people smarter or better. In fact, it made […]
“Although there must be a physical limit to how many memories we can store, it is extremely large. We don’t have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime,” writes Paul Reber.
What kinds of incentives are necessary to get people to lead more environmentally responsible lives? Ernst Weizsäcker, co-chair of the U.N. International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, says that we […]
You might have heard me speak about the equation that eluded Einstein for the last 30 years of his life: the one-inch equation that will in a sense summarize everything we […]
It cost $10 billion and took 16 years, but the Large Hadron Collider finally went into operation yesterday in Switzerland — and the world didn’t end after all.
The amount of money hedge funds make is only surpassed by the amount of secrecy surrounding how they make it. To pull back the curtain on these financial wizards, Big […]
In a recent article in The Australian, Matthew Westwood writes about Canadian social scientist Sarah Thornton, whose book Seven Days in the Art World (cover above) “explores the dynamics of […]
“A few snapshots.” According to novelist Tim O’Brien, that’s all our minds retain of our childhoods, adulthoods, and even the people we’ve loved most deeply. “And that’s memory? Little remnant […]
It’s amazing to think that the work of a groundbreaking photographer such as Henri Cartier-Bresson could once be found on the coffee tables of middle class homes accross America, and […]
Tuesday marks the 30th anniversary of the historic eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington – and Eruptions readers share their memories on the blast that captivated the world.
“How could you conceivably cut yourself off from other men and from the life they bring you in such abundance? In the name of what uncaring, ivory-tower kind of attitude?” […]