bigthinkeditor

Ross Douthat argues that the press and Palin have been at war with each other almost from the first, but their mutual antipathy looks increasingly like co-dependency.

The fall of the Tunisian president Ben Ali played out for all the world on Twitter, some dubbing it a “Twitter Revolution” like the election protests in Iran and Moldovia.

Internet debate can be coarse, but it is holding journalists and politicians to account, writes Boris Johnson. What are we going to do about the lawyers, he asks.

A new film explores how globalization has resulted in crises of the economy, the environment and the human spirit — and points the way to a new path.

Faced with a public health crisis, Portugal decriminalized the possession of all illicit drugs. Nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that its great drug experiment may have worked.

Forget that old tagline about the Internet being an information “superhighway”. The online world is an information battlefield with pranksters and pragmatists struggling to be heard.

Mysticism has no past, no genealogy, and yet it walks and knows why. How do we account for the religious imagination in the U.S. while Europe grows more and more skeptical?

Prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs have more than doubled in the U.S. over the past 15 years, often given for conditions for which there is scant evidence they work.

The shortage of web addresses is “not a crisis but getting more urgent”, say analysts. The web is running out of addresses and IPv6 is the answer.

When future astronomers look to the sky, they will no longer witness the past. Observations will reveal nothing but an endless stretch of inky black stillness.

Today we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on.

Mobile-phone companies across Africa are drawing battle lines to capture the rising middle-class consumer. But in Kenya, the war already is well under way.

Living at a higher altitude may be a risk factor for suicide, a recent study in the journal High Altitude Medicine & Biology has found. The study may help develop new treatments.

Millenniums of bare subsistence have given way to two centuries of luxury. Crass middle-class values are what made the modern world, and we ignore them at our peril.

Mainstream economists are preaching a decade of pain and historically high joblessness as if no alternative policy existed. Dean Baker thinks pessimism has run rampant.

Wikipedia turned 10 years old this week, and perhaps no entry better captures its chaotic ascendency than that of Jesus Christ.

In a major environmental decision, the Environmental Protection Agency has vetoed the largest mountaintop removal mining permit in the history of West Virginia.

The question is not whether culture matters, but whether it is an independent and self-sustaining factor in the production and reproduction of poverty.

Tourists have been evacuated and a state of emergency declared as one of North Africa’s longest-standing regimes falls to popular protest with its President flees the capital.

“There are some ridiculously ugly blogs out there,” says Joshua Brown. The modern money manager tells you how to spruce up your blog to get more readers.

What no one knew until now is that most cars would not work without the intervention of one of Einstein’s most famous discoveries: the special theory of relativity.

A story that the astrological chart has shifted, changing many people’s signs, has caused panic. But calm down! “Everything stays the same,” says astrologist Susan Miller.

In response to a Chinese mother’s strict parenting advice, one Western mom explains the virtues of letting kids quit, having sleepovers and finding their own way.

Freud’s ideas have become part of the fabric of everyday life—yet his methods are going out of favour. Robert Rowland Smith argues that the professionals have got it wrong.

Ron Paul, Congressman and anti-Federal Reserve crusader, has been appointed to chair a monetary policy subcommittee—now might be a good time to ask why we need the Fed.

It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices that threatens our global future.

Fifty years ago, Dwight Eisenhower delivered what has become the best-known presidential farewell address. But was it romanticized out of proportion to its merit?

Matt Warman examines the new ‘Conversation Mode’ for Google Translate for Android, and asks what’s next for the search giant.

It is fanciful to imagine that guns will ever disappear from America…but that does not mean that more effective checks on the mentally unstable are impossible.

How do contemporary intellectuals corrupt their calling? “The intellectual life reduces itself to functional nihilism, warding off despair only by means of attacking the latest ideology.”