In the 6 million years since hominids split from the evolutionary ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos, something happened to our brains that allowed us to become master cooperators, accumulate knowledge at a rapid rate, and manipulate tools to colonize almost every corner of the planet. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A common complaint about the Internet, whether it’s being leveled by a journalist who just lost his newspaper job or someone who found herself the target of online rage, is that it’s such a shallow, spiteful place. While it’s a ludicrous statement — the Internet is merely a medium, not anything homogeneous — the complaint is valid in large, and vocal, parts of the online world. It’s odd that in this age of loosened borders and individualism, online you can be drowned out with boos and hisses just by stating an off-center position. Sure, the idyllic promise of the Internet is that it can bring you news from around the world and expose you to people and things you never would have seen otherwise, but in reality many of us use it simply as an echo chamber. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
One of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans—how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often—comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjected to a battery of tests in special trailers that the C.D.C. hauls around the country. The studies, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
President Dmitry Medvedev recently announced the setting up of a commission to counter the falsification of history. He said this was becoming increasingly “severe, evil, and aggressive. “This is absolute poppycock,” says Robert Service, professor of Russian History at Oxford University. “History is all about argument. There is no absolute historical truth about anything big in history.” But what exactly is worrying Russia? Why is the country convinced that it is the victim of a campaign to make it look bad? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Of all the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behavior, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common belief that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence. But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Kidneys are hard to come by. In the United States, more than 80,000 people are on the official waiting list, all hoping that someone will die in just the right circumstances and bequeath them the “gift of life.” Last year, only 16,517 got transplants: 10,550 with the cadaver organs allocated through the list, and 5,967 from living donors. More than 4,000 on the list, or about 11 a day, died. And the list gets longer every year. Kidney patients ought to command the kind of outrage that demanded a cure for AIDS. The list doesn’t have to exist. It is a result not of medical necessity or economic constraints but of public ignorance, conscious policy, and complacent institutions. Too many people are suffering unnecessarily. Outlawing payments to kidney donors is ostensibly a way to keep the system fair. All it does is give rich and poor an equally lousy chance of getting a kidney. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It is 40 years since Neil Armstrong took his ‘giant leap for mankind’ on the early summer morning of July 20th, 1969. It was the high point of a vast and expensive space program initiated by President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s which ended when Apollo 17’s lunar module lifted off from the Moon on December 14th, 1972. In just under three and a half years, 12 US astronauts walked on the Moon, drove around in their Moon buggy and thrilled television viewers around the world with their barely believable pantomime on a celestial body 236,000 miles from Earth. The Apollo space program that put them there was the product of an age of optimism and daring very different from our own. Andre Balogh argues that Apollo would have never happened if the society of today lived in society’s yesterday. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Fifteen years ago — before Google or Wikipedia or blogging or Craigslist or podcasts or YouTube — the technology investor and pundit Esther Dyson wrote an article analyzing the business of “creative content” in a future where the Internet made distribution essentially free. “Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid,” she predicted. Enforcing copyrights won’t be enough, because creators “will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number. . . . The problem for owners of content is that they will be competing with free or almost-free content.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden—were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today’s Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I cannot remember the first time I heard an American say “cricket is so boring: it lasts for days and still ends in a draw.” Let’s just say it was not this decade or the one before that. I am not going to try and explain cricket—the rules are too complex for a short article. Or to persuade you that cricket is a great game—hundreds of millions of Indians, Pakistanis, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Sri Lankans, Australians, New Zealanders, Bangladeshis, West Indians, Kenyans, Dutch, Welsh, Scots, and English, like me, know it is. All I am going to say is that baseball makes the blood run hot, and yes, Red Sox fans do hate the Yankees. But India and Pakistan nearly went to war over cricket. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
After all the arguments for subordinating women have been shown to be self-serving lies, what are misogynists left with? They have only one feeble argument that is still deferred to and shown undeserving respect across the world, even by people who should know better: “God told me to. I have to treat women as lesser beings, because it is inscribed in my Holy Book.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Ideas evolve quickly along the Friedman family tree. The late Milton Friedman, an economist at the University of Chicago, was one of the 20th century’s most respected and influential advocates for classical liberalism. Milton’s son David took this attitude a step farther in several books on political philosophy and economics. Given the manifest inefficiencies of government, David argued, the healthiest and most efficient social and economic system requires no state at all. Now David’s son Patri has taken the family tradition one step beyond. Inspired by his dad’s classic 1973 book The Machinery of Freedom, Patri Friedman has concluded that society’s design flaw goes deeper than just government itself. Think of the state as a business—but one with enormously high barriers to entry and enormously high exit costs. As it would in the business world, this set-up breeds sclerosis, inefficiency, and the tendency to treat customers like dirt. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
When the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow was asked which countries had the best managed economies for a 2004 Wall Street Journal article, he nominated China, Taiwan and South Korea. Arrow’s point of view is consistent with the widely shared belief that China is the latest successful instalment of the ‘East Asian model’ of authoritarian development (the ‘model’). As David Dollar, the head of the China desk for the World Bank, consistently argues, China is pragmatically replicating many elements of the model. According to Dollar, China’s approach ‘is not that different from what other successful East Asian countries have done before. Don’t be too sure though. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on “the Wall Street Bubble Mafia” — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi’s piece is “an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories” and a spokesman adding, “We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good.” Taibbi shot back: “Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it.” Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi’s piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Sarah Palin’s history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why. <<<To read full article, click here.>>
“Power Is Shifting from West to East.” Not really. Dine on a steady diet of books like The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East or When China Rules the World, and it’s easy to think that the future belongs to Asia. As one prominent herald of the region’s rise put it, “We are entering a new era of world history: the end of Western domination and the arrival of the Asian century.” Don’t believe the hype about the decline of America and the dawn of a new Asian age. It will be many decades before China, India, and the rest of the region take over the world, if they ever do. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Robert Wright has carved out a distinct niche in American journalism. While his essays range freely across the political landscape — from foreign policy to technology — it’s his meaty, book-length forays into evolutionary psychology and the sweep of history that have set him apart. Now his latest book goes after bigger game: God Almighty. In an interview with something to offend everyone, Robert Wright explains why religion has given us a fickle deity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
On the evening of April 27 a ferocious rain raked the windows beside Jamie Williams’s cubicle as the physicist sat, exhausted, immersed in the minutiae of food science. On the computer screen before him were raw tables of information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, containing data on 7,000 foods, from blackberries to beef. He and a four-person team were “curating” the data, readying it for a new kind of online search. He combed through the tabs that identified 150 properties (nutrients, calories, carbohydrates, and so on), making sure the various abbreviations were consistent and readable by computers. He organized foods into groupings to facilitate natural-language queries. A search for nutritional information on “milk” would provide an average value, for example, while “skim milk” would provide a specific answer. What is now called the Wolfram search engine will allow people to make use of science on a daily basis, just as Google has made billions of people reference librarians. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
God has mellowed. The God that most Americans worship occasionally gets upset about abortion and gay marriage, but he is a softy compared with the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. That was a warrior God, savagely tribal, deeply insecure about his status and willing to commit mass murder to show off his powers. But at least Yahweh had strong moral views, occasionally enlightened ones, about how the Israelites should behave. His hunter-gatherer ancestors, by contrast, were doofus gods. Morally clueless, they were often yelled at by their people and tended toward quirky obsessions. One thunder god would get mad if people combed their hair during a storm or watched dogs mate. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Dalai Lama wants “one country, two systems” for Tibet. Tibetans would be happy with one system – the relatively liberal one found elsewhere in China. The leading historian of modern Tibet discusses the background to recent protests on the Plateau. What has been the evolution of its culture, modern and traditional, under the impact of the PRC’s breakneck development and market reforms? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Women in sunglasses and head scarves speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying signs. When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women’s rights protests were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. They were uplifting, they featured women of many ages, and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: the photographs and video taken last weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the streets of Tehran. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The number of bars and cafes in France has fallen from 200,000 half a century ago to 38,600, according to industry associations. More than 2,000 went out of business last year alone as an indoor smoking ban took effect and the world economic crisis bit into budgets. The shifting lunchtime habits, which are more pronounced in large cities such as Paris, are part of a social tug of war in France between the imperatives of a modern industrial economy and a long-cherished tradition of fine food produced and prepared by artisans devoted to their crafts. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“The East, the West, and Sex” is the best sort of book about sex: It is replete with anecdotes from history that titillate as they inform and observations on human nature that amuse as they illuminate, all delivered in language and tone that is broadly moral without being moralizing and certainly far from prudish. To his credit, Mr. Bernstein strives hard to avoid prurience, or even the suggestion of it, although occasionally he does drop his guard, as when he writes of Western men being “powerfully drawn to the slim, small-boned, black-haired women of Asia, more plumlike than melonlike of breast, spare rather than full of buttocks and hips.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Jane D. was a regular visitor to our ER, usually showing up late at night demanding an injection of the narcotic Demerol, the only thing that worked for her severe headaches. One night the staff psychiatrist had the nurse give her an injection of saline instead. It worked! He told Jane she had responded to a placebo, discussed the implications, and thought he’d helped her understand that her problem was psychological. But as he was leaving the room, Jane asked, “Can I get that new medicine again next time instead of the Demerol? It really worked great!” What’s going on here? What is the placebo effect and how does it work? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Sharon Begley examines whether we have a rape gene. The argument has been made by evolutionary psychologists that rape could be an evolutionary adaptation. The idea is that a propensity to rape might be transmitted genetically, because someone who rapes who would be more likely to pass on his DNA than a nicer guy. Rapists, in short, have more children than non-rapists. But Begley looks at evidence from a Paraguayan tribe living a traditional existence and finds that in fact that is not the case. Any given rape is quite unlikely to result in offspring — particularly offspring who survive — while it often leads to the demise of the rapist. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
University of Newcastle professor James Tooley journeyed to Hyderabad, India in early 2000 at the behest of the World Bank, to study private schools there. Or, more specifically, to study familiar private schools—that is, those that served the children of middle-class and wealthy families. But while on a sightseeing excursion to the city’s teeming slums, Tooley observed something peculiar: private schools were just as prevalent in these struggling areas as in the nicer neighborhoods. Everywhere he spotted hand-painted signs advertising locally run educational enterprises. “Why,” he wondered, “had no one I’d worked with in India told me about them?” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Personally speaking, my difficulty with Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry has always been the girls. Because at my elite British boarding school, you understand, there were no girls. At Hogwarts, however, the remote and castellated establishment where Harry Potter pursues his studies, there are girls everywhere: eccentric girls, stalwart girls, mean girls, ghost girls who live in the toilet, girls you get crushes on, girls you can kiss … Is this how a sorcerer is made? By shaking a leg at the school dance? Shouldn’t his education be more like mine—which is to say, a lonely flare of unrequited hormones? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
