bigthinkeditor
“The most frustrating thing about Facebook’s privacy policy is that it’s always changing,” writes Farhad Manjoo. The company should better respect users’ desire for privacy going forward.
America and Greece have lately been running large budget deficits, roughly comparable as a percentage of G.D.P., notes Paul Krugman. Yet markets treat the countries very differently.
New statistical analysis finds that all life on Earth shares a single common ancestor, confirming a “central pillar of evolutionary theory.”
Vast quantities of dispersant chemicals have been sprayed into the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico to reduce environmental damage. But there’s little knowledge about their possible impact.
“Millions of workers who have already been unemployed for months, if not years, will most likely remain that way even as the overall job market continues to improve,” writes Catherine Rampell.
Could business executives learn from the test that London taxi drivers take? Stephen Adshead writes that the process teaches conflict management and the benefit of humility.
“The government’s current policy to leave a great deal of its liabilities off-balance sheet makes the U.S.’s current debt levels look a lot more favorable than they really are,” writes Daniel Indiviglio.
The tea party movement has become “an insta-network for ambitious women,” writes Hanna Rosin. “Some would surprise you with their straightforward feminist rage.”
Western-style Holocaust denial—the attempt to produce pseudo-scientific proofs that the Jewish genocide did not happen—is not that common in the Arab world, writes Gilbert Achcar.
“Nowadays a specimen of unkempt, puffed-up prose or stumbling, lugubrious verse doesn’t even need to make it past an editor or publisher to glide slimily” into our awareness, writes Laura Miller.
New research into the brain provides intriguing information about the neural activity associated with moments of sudden insight.
“The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious” about the deadly nature of Communism, writes Claire Berlinski. “For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives.”
Ever since Niall Ferguson was a boy, and still to this day, the Harvard historian says he has looked to the BBC’s Dr. Who as his superhero role model. Why? […]
“Where is everybody?” the physicist Enrico Fermi once famously asked, disappointed that aliens hadn’t contacted us yet. Over 50 years later, Fermi would feel even more snubbed. As Paul Davies […]
“Instead of creating a joint military, Europe must now be worried about keeping its common currency. Europe could end where it began: in Greece,” writes writes Christoph Schwennicke.
A Japanese mathematician has come up with a cardboard model that seems to defy physics—creating what vision scientists are calling the best illusion of the year.
War-on-terror hawks may believe we must kill and intimidate people who have some nebulous terrorist intent. But Robert Wright is surprised that President Obama would entertain the notion.
In the wake of the housing bust, some squatters are doing so not for financial expediency, but because they reject the idea that homes be treated as commodities.
While in in the past we thought of the earth’s core as fairly homogeneous, it’s now clear that the solid center of the earth is an aggregation of crystals.
William Saletan argues that we shouldn’t ask Elena Kagan is she’s gay, and she needn’t volunteer an answer. Forced disclosure isn’t just a threat to the nomination, he writes, it’s a threat to freedom.
Walter Rodgers suggests the vocalized concerns of tea partiers about big government mask a fear among aging, white Americans of their own diminishing political power.
Sam Harris argued recently that “morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.” He talks about the backlash from people who believe it’s wrong to make moral judgments.
Some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about ways to work with publishers and save quality journalism and information content.
David B. Hart writes that the “New Atheism” has “proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment.”
If Sylvia Earle’s older brother had never borrowed their neighbor’s copper diving helmet and taken his kid sister for a dip in the Weeki Wachee River not far from their […]
While Matt Gross writes a column called the Frugal Traveler for the New York Times, it doesn’t mean he keeps to a strict budget when he’s on the road. To […]
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.
Stephan Faris writes that “it seems unrealistic to base policies on the expectation that asymptomatic HIV-positive youth will permanently abstain from sex.”
Are certain elements of music hard-wired into our brains? If there are universals in how we perceive music and respond to it, our musical sense might have some adaptive value.
The cost of Wall Street’s most recent innovations can be measured in the trillions of dollars. But they have also damaged the whole notion of financial innovation.