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The pseudoscience phrenology swept the popular imagination, and its practitioners made a mint preying on prejudices, gullibility, and misinformation.

You can’t spot a liar just by looking — but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work.

Deep underwater, temperatures are close to freezing and the pressure is 1,000 times higher than at sea level.

Robinson v. California helped to established a rehabilitative ideal: addiction should be dealt with as a therapeutic matter.

Pandemic rumors and information overload make separating fact from fancy difficult, putting people’s health and lives at risk.

Artificial intelligence has so far replaced more menial labor, but could it one day soon come for the more analytical positions in the economy like writers and reporters? What will become of journalism?

“They f**k you up, your mum and dad,” poet Philip Larkin wrote in the late work “This Be the Verse.” “They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ And add some extra, just for you.” Larkin kidded that those lines would be his best remembered, a guess not too far off 30 years after his death. Where others see in those lines a perfect portrait of the sour, sad curmudgeon poet, in the new biography Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love, James Booth sees something different. “The poem’s sentiment is sad, but the poem is full of jouissance,” Booth argues. “This must bid fair to be the funniest serious English poem of the 20th century.” Likewise, Larkin — target of posthumous charges of racism, misogyny, and assorted cruelties — could lay claim to being the “funniest serious” English poet of the 20th century. Booth, who knew and worked with Larkin, shows the sweet, happy side of the sour, sad poet and makes a strong case for learning to love Larkin again, if not for the first time.

For many in my parents’ generation, the half century between now and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 seems like the blink of an eye. The […]

Voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections tends to be lower than other developed democracies and relative to the number of eligible voters., Voter turn-out for those ages 18 to 24 […]

Our BIG THINKING friend Robert de Neufville is right to notice public opinion trending in favor of same-sex marriage.  And so it seems reasonable for him to predict that it […]

So say some of our leading scientists.  Of course, not all experts agree.  Carl Sagan, the inspiration behind the films ET and Contact, thought that we should spend big bucks […]

Released just yesterday, Physics of the Future is my most ambitious book to date. Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the […]