I was raised to honor our military. One of my grandfathers was a Marine sergeant during World War II. The other was an Army lifer who served in three wars […]
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In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
Are human beings’ needs and desires evolving faster than start-up companies can respond to them?
What’s the Big Idea? The paradox of hiring during times of economic hardship is that even when unemployment is high, even when businesses have a vast pool of potential hires […]
[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from August 2010.] I’ve been writing since the beginning of Daylight Atheism […]
Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier argues that free technologies like Facebook come with a hidden and heavy cost – the livelihoods of their consumers.
It’s a big challenge being a spiritual teacher in a secular culture. What could be more disconcerting than being a religious authority in a world where there is no consensus […]
Here’s a little philosophy/psychology experiment you can try for yourself. It just takes a few minutes, and the rest of this post will make much more sense if you do […]
Hello readers. I’ve been on vacation for the last several days. Here’s an old post from my previous blog WhyWeReason.com to fill the void. It’s about a paper by the NYU […]
For many Americans, burgers and fireworks may be enough of a July 4th celebration. But to appreciate the curiosities and meaning of Independence Day, you might want to sit down […]
The still life, or, as the French would say, “nature morte,” died sometime around the middle of the 20th century, despite modern art’s attempts to resuscitate the genre into Cubism […]
An angelic lady from the pre-raphaelite school of femmes fatales is stretched across a map of Europe. Her raised hands clutch a sketch of the late-19th-century European rail network at two of […]
There are many ways to look at Europe other than as a collection of nation-states. Plenty of other imagined communities lurk beneath the surface of the standard political map. Check […]
Any day now, the Supreme Court will release its ruling on the individual mandate in President Obama’s healthcare reform. It will inspire pontification about how far the government can “interfere” […]
In his superb essay about his years as a Mormon (one of the best pieces about faith I have read in a long time) Walter Kirn notes that he said […]
Are we somehow becoming “more than human”?
What is the Big Idea? Samir N. Kapadia’s career in Washington D. C. seemed routine in comparison to the exciting jobs his friends had in India, a surging nation in […]
At Netroots Nation last week, I attended a panel on Citizens United, the infamous case in which the Supreme Court tossed aside decades of campaign finance laws and ruled that […]
What is the Big Idea? During his presidential campaign, François Hollande voiced his support for gay marriage and adoption for LGBT couples. He said he’d pursue the issue in 2013 if […]
A startup company has received a grant to create artificial meat using bio-ink and a 3D printing process.
Our species’ history appears to be aligned to the length of our weapons: how far, how much, how long can we keep attacking, killing, damaging? Men with bullets became men […]
I’ve spent the last two weeks getting licensed to work in a new field. Mitt Romney has spent the last two weeks since Rick Santorum dropped out of the race […]
New research in The Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science finds that people who shop at organic food stores are more inclined to be judgmental. Organic foods “reduce prosocial […]
In a post last May, entitled The First Trillionaires Will Make Their Fortunes in Space, we speculated about how the future explorers of space will be chasing unimaginable riches: As Peter Diamandis […]
I’ve always suspected, to paraphrase an adage from evolutionary science, that the marriage replicates the wedding. The wedding’s style is a germinal expression of the marriage to come, its strengths, […]
What’s the Big Idea? There are not only wrong answers — there are also wrong questions, says Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and author of Big Think’s most recent Book of the Month. And sometimes […]
3D printers have moved quickly from the industrial scale to home use but, despite futurists’ claims to the contrary, they are not quite ready to make you a tea, earl gray, hot.
Not fearing this age’s breakneck technological change, two of the nation’s most prestigious universities are set to offer their classes to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
As I’ve written before, I’m a skeptical of claims, like Jonathan Gottschall’s, about the power of stories to make us better people. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorkeris skeptical too. […]
A childfree friend of mine once memorably wondered why moms are so “judge-y” toward each other. I’m loath to reinforce the rhetorical overkill of calling this judge-y state the “mommy […]