The Present
All Stories
The U.S. does have one thing in its favor: Inertia. The fact that we have been #1 for so long means that we will continue to live off of past success for several years to come. But, we can't live on fumes forever.
Why are people sometimes more emboldened in their beliefs after being exposed to corrective information?
Many Americans are being misled on serious scientific issues, and science journalists have to spend an inordinate amount of time debunking myths which seemingly never die.
How are we supposed to communicate about science in an age when political partisanship and media hype dominate the 24/7 news cycle?
To truly help developing societies, we need to answer their immediate needs.
What the average person in the Westernized world considers to be a big problem is rarely aligned with reality.
The more people are attending to threat-related stimuli, the more anxious they get.
Business work today is about grit, perseverance and a good work ethic. This is where our kids fall down.
A study shows a substantial decline in general intelligence of 1.23 IQ points per decade or 14 IQ points since Victorian times.
Why should you only have sex with the person you are in a relationship with?
When we teach people how to catch liars, it takes us 32 hours. And there are over 30 different things you look for. I’ll tell you a couple of them […]
This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be altruistic because desperate people are scared.
You don’t want to be so modest that you don’t’ do anything, and just sit there like a puddle, but when you do things, you constantly want to be checking for your own biases.
Are all true scientists destined to become atheists? The answer is no, or at least that doesn't seem to be the case judging by statistics.
The hedgehog probes deeply and narrowly; the fox skims lightly and broadly.
Charles Murray has designed a quiz he hopes will have "a salutary effect on bringing to people’s attention the degree to which they live in a bubble that seals them off from an awful lot of their fellow American citizens."
The underlying rules of 3D printing that help innovators get past key cost, time and complexity barriers.
Even if you’re not a royals watcher, you can’t avoid the saga of Will and Kate. Kate Middleton—wife of Prince William, current Duchess of Cambridge, possibly future Queen of England, […]
While the desire to tax churches is not new, it seems as far from reality as possible at this moment. As has been commented, no atheist could possibly hope to […]
Atheist author and magician Penn Jillette asks why we can't use the word "holidays" instead of "Christmas" to be more inclusive.
Why do women find it so hard to resist ruthless, deceitful narcissists?
Jonah Lehrer’s post at The New Yorker details some worrying research on cognition and thinking through biases, indicating that “intelligence seems to make [such] things worse.” This is because, as […]
This essay was previously published on AlterNet. In the summer of 2010, I saw him several times a week: a portly, dark-skinned gentleman, leaning against a pillar in Penn Station […]
Guest post by Samantha Eliza Benten The Law of Non-Contradiction, as stated by Aristotle: “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same […]
Writer Tauriq Moosa argues that our objections to necrophilia come down to primal disgust, and that most ethical arguments against are logically untenable.
These words describe love, desire, and relationships that have no real English translation but they capture subtle realities that even English speakers have felt once or twice.