(Note: This review was solicited and is written in accordance with my policy for such reviews.) Summary: A memoir of escape from the overbearing, oppressive life of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but […]
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Danny Strong appeared LIVE on Big Think the day before the premiere of his controversial new HBO film Game Change, which dramatizes the decision by the McCain campaign to add […]
Do you and your partner have “couple friends”–other couples that you socialize with as a couple? Have you thought about their role in your marriage? University of Maryland professor Geoffrey […]
President Obama apparently thinks the safer way to justify higher taxes on the super rich is to pitch the proposal based on its deficit-reduction potential. But if he wants to get the ball rolling for meaningful tax reform, Obama will summon his rhetorical powers to explain how the Buffett Rule could help reduce the nation’s massive and destructive wealth inequality.
Jonathan Gottschall says stories are good for us. I’ll soon apply myself full-time to story-writing, so you might suppose I’d find this an encouraging thought, but I don’t. It’s an annoying thought. […]
We expect works of art to enlighten us, and we expect science to enlighten us — yet the two fields are frequently regarded as separate, distinct entities which we respond to using different areas of the brain. Are those distinctions are arbitrary?
Noah Millman intervenes sensibly in the great Douthat–Sanchez debate about morality and religion: Okay, so humanists don’t have strong reasons for their faith in human rights. Do Christians have strong […]
Pulp fiction paperbacks sold by the millions, for a dime, in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite their lapel-grabbing, shocking, often tawdry, salacious covers and contents, they’re interesting cultural relics because […]
How would you describe the Republican candidates? A Washington Post/Pew Research poll conducted two weeks ago asked respondents what one word came to mind when they heard the name of […]
What’s the Big Idea? The words “Renaissance man” get thrown around a lot these days, but Nathan Myrhvold’s career evokes the true spirit of the phrase. More polymath than genius, the […]
For those of you who missed last night’s debate on China vs. American capitalism hosted by Intelligence Squared U.S., here is the video. There was one decided winner with 85 […]
John Gray’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is fun because Gray is vehemently opposed to almost everything, but he clearly thinks this is a pretty good book anyway. […]
There are few people I disagree with more than Sarah Palin, but I’m surprised that the famed Correspondents’ Dinner this year will feature the comedian Louis C.K., who’s said some […]
As of March 1, Nevada became the first state in the nation where it is legal for driverless cars to take to the roads, provided they identify themselves with red […]
What is the Big Idea? It’s late May and the year is 1989. Among the chaos in Tiananmen Square is 20-year-old David Tian, who is one of millions bravely chanting […]
This semester, students from a diversity of majors at American University are participating in an advanced seminar I am teaching on science and environmental communication. For the first part of the […]
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not an ideologue. New Yorkers tend to like him and give him the benefit of the doubt because his motivations seem transparently rational. He […]
Well, he was, according to Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic: What’s more important, for the rest of us, is that Obama corrected and clarified the misstatement one day later. Striking […]
I’ll be honest. I’d hoped to hold out a bit longer before falling back on this staple of any Asian culture column, but it was unavoidable in this case. The […]
Human irrationality is an important and fascinating subject, especially when it’s pitted against the assumption that people are rational, which still dominates modern life. Sometimes though evidence of human irrationality […]
Thomas K. Lindsay, quite an erudite and distinguished expert, applauds the decision of post-secondary public technical schools in Texas to evaluate institutions and faculty according to how many students have […]
My friend Matt Zwolinski, a professor of philosophy at University of San Diego, wonders why folks who think taxes ought to be higher, like Warren Buffett, don’t just go ahead and […]
Robert Kaplan asks “How many of you want to get promoted when we talk about succession planning? If you do, you need to work starting day one on developing a […]
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When I started to blog about online education back in January 2009 frankly no one cared. If you take a look at the major tech blogs today you notice that this […]
With spring blooming all around us here in the United States, it’s natural that our thoughts go to, well, last spring, specifically the “Arab Spring” that saw the rise of […]
It must be a terribly confusing time to be a member of the Vatican hierarchy. In an effort to stem the accelerating exodus of Catholic laypeople, they’ve been cracking down […]
There is no turning back. We live in a connected world and we are better because of it. We know more than ever before and we are more social than ever before. But we have to learn to take care of our brains to avoid an iDisorder. Don’t blame Steve Jobs for your compulsions. Take control and do something good for your brain.
As I wrote last year in a chapter at the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change & Society, the imagined public relative to climate change remains a source of ever growing anxiety […]
In a previous post about debating on Twitter, I wrote that I conduct most debates these days through the Socratic method. I find this more effective than arguing by assertion, […]
My household has split opinions on the new Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC. I think it is amazing that a national news show has a black woman with braided hair […]