"Poe is one of the writers who make us who we are," wrote E. L. Doctorow. So how is it that Poe's countrymen could be so hostile to the man? As it turns out, there was villainy at work. 

"The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." - A. Bartlett Giamatti

How can the ethics of compromise and confrontation, as practiced in Washington, be improved?

“What we’re seeing here, this guy is the Leonardo da Vinci—the Albert Einstein—of tennis.”

The scientific mindset, Steven Pinker argues, is "indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality."

We are in need of tools to help us truly examine our own attitudes. 

The idea of the "Eureka! moment" might very well prove to be the most useful concept that Archimedes passed down to us.

How do you get a million and a half people to read a blog post on tax policy? Obama digital wunderkind Teddy Goff has a simple mantra: don't be lame. 

In the spirit of maintaining an open mind, and in an attempt to purge myself of past prejudices, I will be re-reading The Great Gatsby this weekend. 

A study shows a substantial decline in general intelligence of 1.23 IQ points per decade or 14 IQ points since Victorian times.

And so in putting together a playlist of videos as part of an original MOCAtv series called "YouTube Curated By," Kasper selected some moments of real-life risk-taking and spontaneity. 

"None of my videos have any common tie to them," says Brooke Candy, a rapper who has offered her picks of YouTube as part of an original MOCAtv series called "YouTube Curated By." 

We are a community of messy, stumbling, fumbling beings tumbling through space wrestling with a confusing gift of consciousness. And that is the great gift of consciousness. 

How can a uniquely Shakespearean habit of mind can be applied to our own lives in order to help us think more creatively?

Imagine there's no religion. That's what the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch did in his iconic painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights."

The robot band cannot replicate the punk attitude of the Ramones or the soulfulness of B.B. King. Yet.

Just as artists are using technology to enable participation, doctors need to do that too.

collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published.

The rapid transformation in public opinion on legalizing marijuana mirrors changes in support for gay marriage in a number of interesting, yet also contradictory ways. 

The field of 3D printing is advancing rapidly due to a convergence of technologies, or what might be called "a perfect storm."

As a spectator you generate a fair amount of creativity in reconstructing an image in your head in a way that is unique for you and is slightly different for me.

What Tyson has done is presented science from another angle. Call it the "we don’t know it yet" angle.

The Supreme Court could make history with its rulings on the legality of both California's Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage and the federal Defense of Marriage Act. 

"Having strong opinions is part of the joy of being alive, and loving people in spite of those strong opinions is one of the other joys of being alive."

"Let's collectively be the Andrew Carnegie of the 21st century," says John Wood, who details his experience of building and scaling the non-profit Room to Read. 

Shepard Fairey's aesthetic, which has so much to do with appropriating and re-imagining images -- is best understood through the lens of his many colorful influences.

We're moving into an era in which we'll understand how to induce creativity.

The SOPA movement shows us how traditional power structures are being turned on their head to create a future that is significantly more democratized, distributed and universal.

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."

According to Celebrity Apprentice star Penn Jillette, Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow could double as a producer's handbook for reality television.

Full citizenship is the idea in which all members of society see themselves as change agents. 

Do we think it is possible for kids to learn to read on their own? A dispatch from a big bold idea in progress. 

In order to nurture effective collaboration, Mayer, like any CEO, needs to manage collaboration, and eliminate distraction. That begins with the wisdom of knowing the difference.

Is American Exceptionalism "the old whiskey bottle we pull off the shelf when we're feeling down?"

The elite are not necessarily the wealthy but the people who run the country. And they live in almost a different world from the rest of us.

We might like to think that we have completely original minds, but we are easily influenced by others and have an "unknowingness" of how our "human mind meld" works. 

We are very good at generating data. We are just learning how to utilize it, but the mobile health revolution is one of the most promising applications we have seen in this field.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that we need to break out of our "A-to-B thinking" in order to bring big, audacious ideas into existence. 

Some time in March a puff of white smoke will rise over St. Peter's Square. Will it signal a Pope from Africa? 

After September 11, 2001, Congress gave extraordinary powers to the executive branch to combat terrorism. Is the pendulum finally swinging back?

Nothing is a physical concept, because it’s the absence of something. "What we’ve learned over the last hundred years," Lawrence Krauss says, "is that nothing is much more complicated than we would’ve imagined otherwise."

Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Speak Spanish? Lose weight? Then set aside $100 of your pretax income to donate to the Westboro Baptist Church.

New crowdsourcing techniques can be used in amazingly constructive ways. Alternatively, these same techniques may be used as tools that exploit human labor and utilize it for evil purposes. 

There are plenty of people who are single and frustrated, unhappily married, or, on the other hand, happily divorced. What matters most is how they prepare their minds. 

Despite the fact that an estimated one million patients use marijuana as medicine every year, the U.S. has restricted research on marijuana. In other words, we don't know conclusively what its dangers and benefits are. 

Lawrence Krauss argues for differential pay scales for teachers with advanced training in science and math to accommodate the free market.

A new report by the World Economic Forum says we must spend $700 billion annually to wane ourselves off fossil fuels that have been linked to a rise in extreme weather-related disasters in recent years. 

How can we train our brains to think like Sherlock Holmes? We need to develop the core skill of mindfulness.

There are recognizable patterns of behavior and personality traits that we can look for to give us insight into Lance Armstrong's reckless actions, so that this whole affair might be a so-called teachable moment.

What will it mean to have a dissenter like Chuck Hagel as an ombudsman at the top at the Defense Department?

Is the overconsumption of sugar the cause of chronic metabolic disease? 

A new math curriculum is needed to move us from the knowledge economy to "the computational knowledge economy where high-level math is integral to what everyone does."

Big Data is becoming as powerful an asset as oil, and it will be the source of many high quality jobs in the near future. 

How can the government change the framework of choices that particular people are faced with so that their own small errors in risk perception don’t expose the whole of society?

When there is exponential improvement in the price and performance of technology, jobs that were once thought to be immune from automation suddenly become threatened. 

Will increased connectivity create more good or more evil in the future? Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of the tech giant with the famous founding motto of "Don't be evil," is naturally concerned with this question.

Atheist author and magician Penn Jillette asks why we can't use the word "holidays" instead of "Christmas" to be more inclusive. 

We have a blind spot when it comes to predicting our own moral and ethical behavior, but new research suggests we are better, not worse, when part of a crowd. 

Parodies of Kim Jong-un and North Korea are indicative of the scary reality that we simply don't have a lot of information about what is actually happening inside North Korea. 

Ethan Nadelmann, a leading expert on drug policy, sees evidence that Obama is willing to move in "a somewhat new direction" on drug policy. 

As more people derive their income from careers that rely on public exposure, the cachet and economic appeal of simply being a celebrity will decrease. 

How is it that such a persistent stereotype -- which is certainly not unique to Jersey Shore-- has been reproduced for so long, and continues to resonate in today's culture? 

Joi Ito says the key to innovation is not the ability to see things through a crystal ball, but rather, to figure it out as you go along.

Big Data is becoming as powerful an asset as oil, and it will be the source of many high quality jobs in the near future. 

Evolution is by definition a difficult concept to grasp since you can't observe it happening in front of you. Nevertheless, some unlikely converts are coming over to Bill Nye's point of view. 

Will you be better off this year than your were in the past? To the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, the answer is a resounding yes. 

Our prehistoric ancestors are the ones who did the heavy mental lifting for which we owe our expanded frontal cortexes. So who has the right brain for today?

Like any big, bold idea, Elon Musk's plan for colonizing Mars strikes you at first glance as indeed crazy. And yet, the reason for Musk's success in leading four of the most innovative companies in America is that he is analytically minded, first and foremost. 

Increased benefit choice brings along with it increased risk. For instance, what if employees choose options like paid time off at the expense of long-term benefits that will be much more valuable to themselves and their families over time?

The new consumer doesn't wait in line to get a deal at Target. She buys what she wants, wherever she wants it, whenever she wants it.

According to Julia Galef, simply asking question "how do I compare expected benefits against each other?" is already "far more than most people just intuitively do when they want to help the world."

Tim Ferriss's new book, The 4-Hour Chef, is a book about learning disguised as a cookbook. 

The more we learn about the universe, the more we move back to the center again.

What do Jeremy Bentham's nineteenth-century prison reforms have to do with David Petraeus and Google's biannual "Transparency Report"?

How long will it take for computers to exhibit human-level intelligence? Experts wildly disagree, and the most exciting scientific race of the 21st century is underway.

Why do women find it so hard to resist ruthless, deceitful narcissists?

Your task, Neil de Grasse Tyson says, is to find opportunities that allow you to express your unique talents in ways that society will value and reward.

Just as POWs developed a method to communicate by tapping a code through their cell walls, Dr. Dennis Charney says we all need a tap code to enable us to share feelings with people we can count on. 

If all of the spending cuts and revenue increases that make up the fiscal cliff go into effect, it would represent an estimated $720 billion in total austerity measures for 2013. Who is ready to stomach that?

Will Germany follow the course of radical transparency or offshore inter-bank deposits? 

This was indeed a choice election, if you consider the choice between consuming entertainment journalism or data-based journalism. Entertainment is fun, and math is hard. Math won. 

Richard Tafel says that failed social movements are the ones that ignore the conservative mindset that is based on results, whereas the liberal mindset is based on rights.

In an age of hyper-polarization, Norquist represents ideological rigidity at its core. So does this make him a hero or "the roadblock to realistically reforming our tax code"? 

A higher percentage of Americans believed in the British crown in 1776 than the percentage of Americans who trust Congress today. Larry Lessig has an idea to change all of that.