Culture & Religion
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Free markets aren’t like gravity. They’re ruled by neither laws of nature nor commandments carved in stone. Delegating our ethics to markets risks costly error. All things are not equally auctionable.
Envy hurts, and it can devolve into nastiness and even violence, but envy can also encourage us to aspire to our better or our best selves at work, school or at home.
Have we learnt nothing from the racist, ineffective laws that form the basis of America’s longest war: the War on Drugs?
What does the art of Andy Warhol tell us about the nature of boredom and the ways we try to escape (and enjoy) it?
If you remove the media microscope, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah has promise but should have more “with Trevor Noah.”
It’s not that doing good is bad. Rather we get uncomfortable around those who are more altruistic than ourselves.
When was the last time you could talk about a show everyone had seen?
A senior engineer at Google shines a light on the dystopian possibilities of the online world that we all inhabit.
Studies show that television shows featuring minorities help us ease our attitudes toward people who are “different.” We look back at the past thirty years and see how that came to be.
Lying is deception. It’s also human: 60 percent of us can’t go for longer than 10 minutes without doing it.
Painting for Picasso was rule-breaking, serious business, but sculpture was rule-innocent child’s play.
The world’s most powerful and influential nations are democracies that have been ineffective (at best) at combating climate change.
America is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, so how could people from much poorer ones be better off health-wise than us?
We know music and emotion are connected, but neuroscience tells us why music is such an integral part of what makes us human.
Many efforts to develop family-friendly workplaces emphasize rights and privileges for mothers. Some dads are pushing back; some even resorting to legal means.
A new Barnes Foundation show highlights the connections between ancient artisanal ironwork and modern art.
By examining our minds at a quantum level, we change them, and by changing them, we change the reality that shapes them.
I’m a granola-eating hippie liberal, and I kind of admire Carly Fiorina. What happens when we like a person, but hate their politics?
A philosophy school with a $1 million dollar prize believes that knowledge truly is power.
Apple CEO Tim Cook came out in order to help gay young people do the same. But what if every LGBT public figure had the same bravery?
“You’ll never get a good job, son, if you’re smoking pot all the time!” That’s a scolding you won’t hear in the future.
The rise of China. The power of Russia. The spread of ISIS. Are Western values (i.e. democracy, human rights, and popular sovereignty) losing their influence in the world?
Mark Zuckerberg flip-flops on a feature he once described as not “socially valuable.”
We’re not living in the most discourse-friendly age in history. Nowhere is that more clear than in comments sections.
Many of us need to share where we were on 9/11, and telling our story may be the best way for us to heal.
Researchers are looking for signs of life in different places: in their destruction, like that of a nuclear apocalypse.
The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. So does the sleep of imagination.
The obvious answer is yes, of course. But they often do not show it.
Researchers hope training machines to the test will allow for advances in imbuing software with basic common sense.