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You often hear people say there’s going to be this massive maker economy in which everybody’s a designer.  That’s actually not going to happen. 

The man who killed a prostitute because she wouldn’t return his $150 has been acquitted. Now what?

This week’s Supreme Court decisions have been the main topics streaming into my Facebook and Twitter feeds (along with a few heartfelt thoughts for Nelson Mandela). Escaping a thumbs up […]

A month or two ago I wrote about the rampant proliferation of “hotness” ratings for women where they have no business or place. Even the most accomplished women, ranging from […]

Digital cuisine is something that everybody gets excited about, and for good reason. 

The world just lost a brilliant and fearless journalist. Michael Hastings did more in his short life than most people do in an entire lifetime. As information continues to come […]

Eric Liu puts forward a “modest proposal” in this month’s Atlantic: instead of being awarded citizenship upon birth, perhaps Americans should have to pass a citizenship test just like immigrants to […]

People have hang-ups and blind spots and phobias and just sometimes they have a principled refusal to take something seriously. 

Murder, they wrote. The suspect? Media mogul, sports agent, and rapper Jay-Z. The victim? Performance art. The accomplices? Performance artists!? When Jay-Z decided to shoot the video for his song […]

Cybersexism: Sex, gender and power on the Internet Laurie Penny Bloomsbury, 2013 (available from Amazon) Sexism – whether existing in meat- or cyberspace – is the noise people make who […]

If you live long enough everything can happen. Cloning, Honey Boo Boo, a feature movie based on “The Brady Bunch,” Twitter… “I miss the 1970s,” a friend says at a […]

Yesterday, the journal Psychological Science published a paper by Uri Simonsohn online (it’s behind a paywall but you can access a free earlier version here). The paper calls on researchers […]

As artist Robert Williams grew up in his often dysfunctional, divorced home in the 1940s and 1950s, his mother wished he’d become a cowboy. After seeing Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 […]

Melville’s sentence exposes the fiction between employers and employees that employees have any choice in the matter. 

Perhaps the most obstructing barrier to treating neurological conditions is quite literally a barrier.

Don’t try this at home A man who expects to soon be blind has implanted a magnet into his ear, which can now be used as a wireless headphone. The […]

What would people use a 3-D printer at home for? Probably for making things that are consumable that they need on demand.

The first two words that came to my mind about the Rolling Stone cover of The Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were “craven” and “disingenuous,” but they were followed by other words. […]

If you thought the concept of people traveling between cities – or even across the nation – in a matter of minutes was just a bit of Jetsons science fiction […]

A partnership between Google and NASA has resulted in the purchase of a quantum computer which both organizations expect to aid in the development of artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning.

I find it fascinating that based on what we now know, we can’t yet say that it’s impossible to travel in time. 

Don’t be afraid of looking into your own genetic make-up. 

“Lucien Freud said if you’re painting humans you have the best subject matter in the world. It’s so true. That’s the concept of [my] work. Everything has humanity in it,” […]

Going to college in the mid 70s I started to smoke marijuana occasionally and wondered why people were getting arrested.  Why did I have to worry about getting arrested for this sort of thing?

A paper titled “Welcome to My Brain” has been published in the journal Qualitative Inquiryby Sage which is so unintelligible that it is baffling beyond belief. Unfortunately, the paper is […]

To buy Stephen King’s latest novel, Joyland, you’ll have to go to an actual bookstore in an actual place. He’s not e-publishing it. I got my first Kindle 18 months […]

It is a new world where Machiavellian’s vertical hierarchies have been complemented with horizontal webs and networks.

With all apologies to Neil Young, this is the story of Johnny Rotten, or at least the story of his clothes. PUNK: Chaos to Couture, which opens today at the […]

I wish I could sketch well because it turns out that so many ideas start with images. 

When you have a very rigid society without social mobility the underachieving kids of overachieving parents get a privileged run and get helped into colleges they shouldn’t really be getting into.