For close to two decades Cass Seltzer has all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it, not anyone with the smarts to do academic research in psychology and the ambition to follow through. But now things had happened — fundamental and fundamentalist things — and religion as a phenomenon is on everybody’s mind. And among all the changes that religion’s new towering profile has wrought in the world, which are mostly alarming if not downright terrifying, is the transformation in the life of one Cass Seltzer. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In virtually every Western society, education is in trouble. Unfortunately, however, policymakers tend to obsess only about the symptoms of the problem – unsatisfactory standards in core subjects, growth of a cohort of poorly schooled underachievers or erosion of classroom discipline – and not the cause. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A little late in making those Thanksgiving flight plans? Wondering how you could possibly afford your ticket — that is, without putting a kidney up for sale on Craigslist? Good news! You can get a free flight home on Southwest plus a $300 travel voucher. Just do what I plan to — get on a Southwest flight in the next few days, and when it’s taking off, shout over and over, “Go, plane, go!” and “I want Daddy! I want Daddy!” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Cook as vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In Culture, Music on November 25, 2009 at 10:55 am
Armstrong’s lack of prejudice extended to Jews, an attitude that was comparatively rare among blacks of his generation. Outside his marriages, his closest adult relationship was with Joe Glaser, a Jewish gangster from Chicago who became his manager in 1935 and with whom he was intimately associated from then on. Armstrong described Glaser as “my dearest friend,” and those who knew both men well agreed that this was nothing more than the truth. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
If you examine philosophy-department offerings around America, you’ll find staple courses in “Philosophy of Law,” “Philosophy of Art,” “Philosophy of Science,” and a fair number of other areas that make up our world. Why, then, don’t you find “Philosophy of Journalism” among those staple courses? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The statistics on U.S. math performance are grim. American eighth-graders ranked 25th out of 30 countries in mathematics achievement on the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which claims to assess application of the mathematical knowledge and skills needed in adult life through problem-solving test items. With a math program already failing, perhaps educators need to change how they are teaching mathematics. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!) represents everything that is most deranged about religion. If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine. Frank Schaeffer explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Levitt and Dubner have in mind a very particular kind of “technological fix.” Wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels—these are all, in their view, more trouble than they’re worth. Such technologies are aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, which is the wrong goal, they say. Cutting back is difficult and, finally, annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? This sounds, the pair write, “like wearing sackcloth.” Wouldn’t it be simpler just to reëngineer the planet? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“Do you think he even knows the rest of us are here?” old-school Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell whispered in 1986 to his fellow Supreme Court justice, the legendary Thurgood Marshall. Both men were looking on as their newest colleague grabbed the chance to play pit bull. Greenhorns on the nation’s high court usually put obsequiousness first and assertiveness second, but not Antonin “Nino” Scalia. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 1921, Albert Einstein’s first trip to America triggered the kind of mass hysteria that would greet the Beatles four decades later. But as newly published documents show, it also tore a sharp rift between European Zionists and some of their fellow Jews across the Atlantic, men like Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, who felt that the best way for Jews to get ahead was to assimilate, not agitate for a Jewish homeland. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Just in the past few years, the scientific world has been rocked by a series of high-profile frauds. Within the physical sciences, accusations arose in 2002 of data rigging in a search for exotic nuclei at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. What does this mean for modern science? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What makes economies grow? It’s a question that has occupied thinkers for centuries. Most of us would tick off things like education levels, openness to trade, natural resources, and political systems. Here’s one you might not have considered: hell. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
With student debt rising and more of those enrolled failing to graduate in four years, there is a growing sentiment that college may not be the best option for all students. At the same time, President Obama has called on every American to receive at least one year of higher education or vocational training. The Chronicle Review asked higher-education experts to weigh in. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who is curating a new exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, talks to SPIEGEL about the place lists hold in the history of culture, the ways we try to avoid thinking about death and why Google is dangerous for young people. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The events of 1989 are most often depicted as the failure of socialism. It’s a powerful interpretation that has served to discredit alternatives to the capitalist system, which is said to have triumphed, and to bestow upon capitalism an aura of legitimacy based not only on a reading of recent history but also on assumptions about the natural order, not least human nature. Capitalism, it is proposed, is the normal state of human traffic in what people make and value and need; socialism is the deviation. History, however, is always more complicated and messy than the moral and ideological tales it may be called to serve. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
One out of every five Americans is either a Californian or a Texan. They are broadly similar: populous Sunbelt states with large metropolitan areas, diverse economies, and borders with Mexico producing comparable demographic mixes. Unpacking the numbers is even more revealing—and, for California, disturbing. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more Americans moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. As Tiebout might have guessed, this outmigration has to do with taxes. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
After events like Fort Hood, why do public officials have to sound like college diversity deans? As though Americans will be hanging Muslims from lamp posts? Why not honesty? <<<More.>>>… <<<Still more.>>>…<<<And, some more.>>>
Wikipedia still has its critics, skeptics who doubt its merits as a reference source. But even they cannot deny the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia-the-project. Every professional conference—on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to journalism to philanthropy—now includes the mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt The Wikipedia Model, as if it were a set of Lego pieces that could be ordered from eBay and assembled in a newsroom or on the trading floor. But does Wikipedia really work? Can we really trust it? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
John Allen Paulous admits to reading tabloid headlines while in line at supermarkets. Often the headlines and stories are true enough in a literal sense, but seriously misleading. In this regard they’re not always that different from some cable or mainstream media stories. In any case, here are five possible tabloid stories followed by five brief explanations. You might want to figure out your own explanations before reading the ones here. Can you spot the misleading headlines? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.” Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal “Race to the Top” initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
One of the main challenges facing Russia is its relationship with Islam, both on the internal front and in foreign policy. Islam is “Russia’s fate.” This was the prediction made a few years ago by Aleksei Malashenko, one of Russia’s leading (and most reliable) experts on Islam. This may be an exaggeration, but perhaps not by much. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The extinction of the narrative may be ruining civilization, Ben MacIntyre explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that 6,000 languages can induce in real life, the story makes a certain sense. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“Ardi Refutes Darwin’s Theory,” Al Jazeera announced, in an Oct. 3 article not available on the English version of the website. “American scientists have presented evidence that Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong,” the article opened. “The team announced yesterday that Ardi’s discovery proves that humans did not evolve from ancestors that resemble chimpanzees, which refutes the longstanding assumption that humans evolved from monkeys.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Who are smarter, liberals or conservatives? This is the kind of question that could spark fierce and endless debates between political opponents, but what if we could know, scientifically, that one side has the edge in brainpower? Should that change how we think about political issues? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
My view of wisdom in medicine, perhaps ironically, comes not from a scientific treatise or clinical tome. Rather, it derives from words that I have heard and repeated since childhood but only after decades of clinical practice realized how they apply to the care of patients. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The printed word is not dead. We are not about to see the demise of the novel or the shuttering of all the bookstores, and we won’t all end up on Twitter. But we are clearly in the midst of a cultural transformation. For today’s younger people, Google is more likely to provide a formative cultural experience than The Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22 or even the Harry Potter novels. There is no question that books are becoming less central to our cultural life. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
These days, American food is far more complicated and infinitely better. The U.S. has revolutionized its culinary culture over the last 40-odd years. No longer is it the developed world’s worst food nation; in fact, it’s perhaps the best. And it’s largely thanks to the (currently disputed) genius of America’s entrepreneurial capitalism. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
