Personal Growth

The other day my Triscuits came with a package of basil seeds glued into the box. According to the instructions, these could be used to start my very own “home […]

Jennifer Bleyer reports on how the young, trendy and extremely broke are buying fresh organic produce using government-subsidized “food stamps.” Got a problem with that?

Gretchen Rubin, whose “The Happiness Project” is both a bestselling book and a popular blog, concedes that the title may be something of a misnomer. “Happiness,” she says, has a […]

Talented ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro says the traditional Hawaiian instrument, which he learned to play at just 4 years of age, could make the world a less violent place to live in.

Two new exhibitions about band the Grateful Dead have just opened at the New York Historical Society and the University of California, proving the dead live on.

The prevailing wisdom among millions of people on this planet is that God governs everything that happens. That idea about God has been a source of debate for some time […]

Author and model Jenny McCarthy has blogged a defense of a controversial “cure” for children who suffer from autism, asking, “Who’s afraid of the truth about autism?”

Drinking beer increases human attractiveness to malaria-carrying mosquitoes, according to researchers who say their findings need to be integrated within public health policies.

Whether it’s snapping at a colleague or hitting a malfunctioning gadget, we all get mad sometimes. The Wall Street Journal asks if anger management can fix us…

Twenty-six years after Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” premiered, the evil genius is back with his sequel “Love Never Dies” being unveiled in London today.

Mathematicians taken up with finding the square roots of algebraic equations have had the niggling problem that such solutions involve illogical square roots of negative numbers.

Schools across America are switching to a four-day week, hoping to stave off the effects of budget cuts – but fuelling fears of hurting kids’ education.

Anoushesh Ansari is the world’s first female private space explorer, as well as the first astronaut of Iranian descent. Today, in a Big Think interview (conducted in partnership with the […]

Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ uses all his best tricks: visual splendor, darkness and Jonny Depp. But The Salon asks if the famed director has fallen down a rabbit hole.

Whether it’s deciding what to drink, what to wear or whom to marry, The Salon’s Thomas Rogers asks if America’s decision-obsession is always for the best.

A Chinese homeless man from the city of Ningbo has caused a sensation for the rag-tag but well co-ordinated clothes he wears, drawing legions of internet fans.

People who think that journalist Ryszard Kapuściński was a liar are missing the point, writes one Guardian blogger, who says there is no sharp frontier between literature and reporting.

Four decades after the publication of Germaine Greer’s seminal feminist work “The Female Eunuch,” it has provoked an astonishing attack by a fellow Australian writer Louis Nowra.

The Salon’s Laura Miller gives a word to the to wannabe writers – summarising the rules for writing fiction and advice from the point of view of a consumer rather than a fellow scribe.

A Texan mother was startled to find a severed snake’s head in a packet of frozen green beans while cooking for her family of four kids in Houston.

Being happy means you are much less likely to develop heart disease a new study has revealed after finding an independent relationship between positivity and the condition.

It was a star-spangled day for America at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada yesterday with a trio of home-grown athletes striking gold.

Giant, mottled ceramic sculptures of men and women by the late Viola Frey are among the “unappreciated wonders of late 20th Century art,” according to the New York Times.

A Scottish terrier is America’s new “top dog” after Sadie the Scottie walked off with the title last night by winning best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.

The Independent’s Robert Fisk meets Palestine’s defiant tunnellers, who scramble through an underground maze connecting Egypt, Israel, and Gaza, smuggling all manner of goods.

Terrified tourists were left suspended 1,600 feet above the ground in the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, when its elevator broke.

Egyptian fruit bats apparently hit their food targets by deliberately not aiming at them. They point their sonar sound beam to either side of the target instead.

A deluge of snow has hit Washington, leaving 200,000 without power and the streets deserted as a mammoth blizzard holds Capitol Hill in its freezing grasp.

Toads have “taken over” almost all of the modern world after an ancestral mutation allowed the creatures to thrive under drier conditions that their amphibian peers.

The New Orleans Saints danced as they celebrated trouncing the Indianapolis Colts 31-17 yesterday, marking the team’s first ever Super Bowl win in its 43 year history.