I’m not a big science fiction reader, but I admire how the genre has just enough of a toehold in reality that it feels plausibly weird. It stakes out the […]
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Who controls the Internet and how do these powerful groups shape our choices and in some cases threaten our privacy? Those are among the questions probed by Laura DeNardis, an […]
–Guest post by American University graduate student Laila Yette. Through the use of sites like Facebook and Twitter, President Obama’s 2008 campaign changed the way that we view social media […]
Can we be aware without actually paying attention? In other words, can our brains somehow imbibe visual information from the outside world without any conscious effort on our part? It […]
So you want to live forever? Double-check your motives, says ethicist Paul Root Wolpe.
In an advancement in biotechnology, a new microscope has allowed researchers to watch molecules move within a cell on a millisecond-by-millisecond time scale for the first time.
Now that the silly season of American politics revs up for another presidential election, it’s a fair question to ask who will be the next great caricature? Nixon cast his […]
Clinical trials show marijuana might be useful for pain, nausea and weight loss in cancer and HIV/AIDS and for muscle spasms in multiple sclerosis. But research funding is sparse.
I’m going to be frank with you: parts of the book are an exhausting experience. “Boring” is the wrong word, but this is not a “fun” classic nineteenth-century American novel. This is a feat of endurance, captain.
Doug Melton, of Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute, speaks of a new era of medicine in his Floating University lecture. Medicine will no longer aim to simply fix you if you have a disease or injury, but replenish you in order to maintain your young and vibrant state.
Friends sometimes ask me about the signs of marriages on the brink. Can mere mortals, without credentials even!, predict which marriages are likely to divorce? It makes for a fascinating […]
In today’s article I would like to share a video of my old friend Jon Bischke who recently gave a talk on TEDxManhattanBeach about his thoughts on combining the Learning […]
If past trends are any guide, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature will go to a post-postmodern Francophone novelist from a forgotten duchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And yet partisans […]
We become high achievers by working on something important—all the while procrastinating doing something even more important.
“A second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” was Oliver Wendell Holmes’ assessment of Franklin Roosevelt, reflecting an old and widespread notion that the smartest and most ingenious person in the […]
Peer into any young American boy’s imagination, and you’ll likely find knights, soldiers, and pirates roaming about. That fact is a true today as it was a century ago. One […]
I love Rockwell’s rendering of the Thanksgiving feast. Three generations circle the food—a nuclear family more rarely seen today in person, but still existing in our hearts and minds in modern permutations.
–Guest post by Francesca Ernst, American University graduate student. As we draw closer to November 2012, pundits, columnists, and reporters alike are all discussing the ways President Obama must transcend […]
–Guest post by Faizullah Jan, American University doctoral student. Single Page View “We are the 99%,” proclaim the protesters participating in the Occupy Wall Street marches and sit-ins. Without a […]
In one of those strange collisions between leatherbound Literature and paperless modern news, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” was read aloud at Occupy Wall Street on Friday. Not only that, […]
When we habituate to something, our physical and psychological response becomes so used to it that whatever the “it” is stops being arousing.
This semester I am teaching a doctoral seminar on the important questions and trends related to media, technology and democracy. In this post, I introduce several major topics and provide […]
The plural of Texas? My money’s on Texases, even though that sounds almost as wrong as Texae, Texi or whatever alternative you might try to think up. Texas is defiantly […]
During his lifetime, Diego Rivera stood as one of the most important and controversial artists in the world. Today, thanks to the international feminist phenomenon of Frida Kahlo (who stood […]
Warning, the four minutes you will spend reading this blog post may be hazardous to your marriage.Or so you might think. New research out of the Netherlands examines the relationship […]
–Guest post by Declan Fahy, American University. The interactive horror-themed websites Hotel626.com and Asylum626.com are the cornerstones of a complaint filed last week by a coalition of four consumer and […]
The Tahirih Justice Center is one of the U.S.’s foremost legal defense organizations for immigrant women and girls fleeing human rights abuses such as domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, […]
Recently, while working on a piece about memory and smell, I came upon a concept that I’d never before heard about: blind smell. I’d read often enough about blindsight, the […]
Is the West presently severely disadvantaged with regard to Asia, if not in relative decline?
We need to double down on collective leadership in both the public and private sectors. It’s the only way to make things work in what many would call our broken society – a society in which people (whether they’re employees or voters) desperately yearn for competence at the top.