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The 'bloodless' Aroostook War is variously said to have cost the life of a cow, a pig, or a single U.S. private.

Leonardo da Vinci didn’t invent the sfumato technique, which produced the “smoky” effects of masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa, but he may have perfected it. For centuries, art experts […]

n The Eurovision Song Contest proves that H.L. Mencken’s famous dictum about quality standards in the US media – “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public” […]

They could have made it more complex, but they would have had to try very hard

Following the AAAS meetings in February, I had this to say about the future of science and environmental journalism: The future will be online, in film, and/or multi-media, merging reporting […]

“Mad, bad and dangerous”, these are the epithets apparently attached to Gordon Brown, our previous Prime Minister by Tony Blair our previous Prime Minister but one. They form the centre […]

If Europe has one defining cultural characteristic, it is that it has none. This may sound like too neat a paradox, but it’s not that far from the truth. There […]

A youngster in breeches and an elderly man with a scythe, both white and together looking rather vulnerable, are playing dice against a team of unreliable-looking Asians. The object of their […]

n A – “Now you’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s Old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center […]

Mark Twain was a great American novelist, but Nathanial Rich notes that in his own lifetime—which ended exactly a hundred years ago today—he was read more widely as a travel writer.

This map beautifully captures the changeable course of the Big River

This week’s NY Times magazine runs a cover story by Nicholas Dawidoff on Freeman Dyson and his doubts about the urgency of climate change. Many critics have decried the article […]

Whether you call it the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” or the “June Fourth Incident” (as it’s known in the People’s Republic of China), what happened in Beijing 21 years ago today […]

Beginning Friday, shoppers at more than 6,000 drugstores will be able to pick up a test to scan their genes for a propensity for Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, diabetes and other ailments.

Gone are the days when crossing a border in Europe almost always meant having to change currencies. Converting guilders into Deutschmark, francs to pesetas, or whatsits into whatnots — all […]

Here are some of the what I consider to be this year’s essential rnreadings on politics. In particular, today I want to look at some of the crucial rnissues that underlie domestic politics in America.

Next week there will be big news on the science communication front. In anticipation, I was just going back over some things that I have written on the topic over […]

Would days spent reading Proust make us more attentive? The Times cover story today implies, Yes. New research argues against the opposing onslaught: video games, iPods; inevitable, en masse drift […]

Slides and synchronized video of the presentations from the AGU panel “Re-Starting the Conversation on Climate Change: The Media, Dialogue, and Public Engagement Workshop” are now online. Below I link […]

The original map of Treasure Island was lost - if it still exists, it must surely be worth a fortune now...

Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron announces today that deep cuts in public expenditure “will change British life”. They will in short be the most drastic public spending cuts in a […]

For me, this might be the original strange map. When I was a kid, I had the Spitting Image book that contained this map. I spent hours (well… whole quarters of hours) […]

Edmund White is one of the finest writers writing today, and the fact that he is writing a blog for the New York Review of Books—or, moreover, the fact that […]

Raw Story breathlessly reports that a researcher is experimenting with dangerous drugs to stop girls from growing up to be lesbians: “Afraid your daughter may be queer, or not be […]

The Maine Solar System Model recreates the relative distances between the sun and planets along a stretch of U.S. Highway 1

By mid-century there will likely be 9 billion people on the planet, consuming ever more resources and leading ever more technologically complex lives.

We have been repeatedly disappointed in our hopes that economic liberalization in China and Russia would pave the way for media liberalization, writes Mark Gimein.

The relationship between literary talent and literary fame is not so interesting to discuss (being so much discussed, and yet being uniquely subjective). Why should we care if the writers […]

When pundits like Richard Dawkins use the trust and authority granted them as scientists to denigrate religious publics, is it unethical?On issues such as climate change, nanotechnology, and evolution, research […]

“It’s obvious to anybody that the mind does much more than solve problems,” Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says in his Big Think interview. “But in a more fundamental way, […]