Hugh Hefner, the inventor of Playboy, has sold his idea of what sex should be with the winning fervor of a true believer, and while not exactly everyone has bought into it, he has enticed multitudes into his fold with the promise of as much pleasure as a body can manage in a lifetime, all of it perfectly innocent, of course. And what sensible person, playboy or playgirl, could possibly want anything better? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
For almost 400 years, the residents of the Bavarian village of Oberammergau have performed their world-famous Passion Play, a reenactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. But the play’s avant-garde director, who is determined to erase traces of anti-Semitism from the piece, has left locals at odds over how to reconcile modern Christianity and tradition. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Michael Sorkin, an architect and critic, and Sharon Zukin, an urban sociologist, have each written what they describe as books about contemporary New York City—but that’s putting things far too broadly. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both. Many other people have thought so too. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
When President Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court last week, he described her appeal in much the same way he has described his own: as a postpartisan figure. Just as Obama and Kagan represent a generation of national political figures trying to be postideological, so too they represent a distinctive generation of figures in elite law schools—as does Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
‘A foolish story, such as is told by garrulous old women’ is how the Oxford dictionary defines an old wives’ tale. Despite being treated with contempt over the centuries, these narratives served not only to amaze and appal children but to teach them coded lessons about the realities of life, from toilet training to pregnancy, argues Germaine Greer. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown us that there’s no there there. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What does it mean to be French? A simple enough question, and one that has exercised many minds over the centuries, but to ask it these days in Paris seems akin to drawing swords. Consider what happened to President Nicolas Sarkozy when at the end of 2009 he launched a nationwide series of “town hall” discussions on the issue of French identity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
You’re not likely to hear about this from your doctor, but fake medical treatment can work amazingly well. For a range of ailments, from pain and nausea to depression and Parkinson’s disease, placebos–whether sugar pills, saline injections, or sham surgery–have often produced results that rival those of standard therapies. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
For years, from his senior position in Estonia’s Defense Ministry, Herman Simm leaked highly sensitive NATO intelligence and the names of Western spies to Russia’s foreign intelligence service. In a classified damage analysis, NATO concludes that the former KGB colonel was one of the “most damaging” spies in the history of the alliance. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Many people see the decline of embarrassment as a good thing. “Why shouldn’t I be able to do X?” People often say this after having done something outrageous or transgressive. But this misunderstands the distinction between embarrassment – a mild but necessary correction of inappropriate behavior – and shame, which is a stronger emotional response usually involving feelings of guilt about more serious breaches of conduct. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Aids denialism is estimated to have killed many thousands. Jon Cartwright asks if scientists should be held accountable, while overleaf Bruce Charlton defends his decision to publish the work of an Aids sceptic, which sparked a row that has led to his being sacked and his journal abandoning its raison d’etre: presenting controversial ideas for scientific debate. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Germans did not realize—until it was too late—that “William Martin” was a fiction. The man they took to be a high-level courier was a mentally ill vagrant who had eaten rat poison; his body had been liberated from a London morgue and dressed up in officer’s clothing. The letter was a fake. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Fans of sports underdogs have had an amazing run these past few months. In February, the New Orleans Saints won their first-ever Super Bowl, an upset victory over the invincible Colts.. At the beginning of April, a little-known college from the Midwest made it to the NCAA basketball title game against the hated Blue Devils. And more recently, the Oklahoma City Thunder very nearly forced the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers to a seventh game in the first round of the NBA playoffs. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Greece is only the beginning. The world’s leading economies have long lived beyond their means, and the financial crisis caused government debt to swell dramatically. Now the bill is coming due, but not all countries will be able to pay it. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Humans are social animals, and so were their ancestors, for millions of years before the first campfires lighted the night. But only recently have humans come to understand the mathematics of social interactions. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith wasn’t the free-market fundamentalist he is thought to have been. It’s time we realised the relevance of his ideas to today’s financial crisis. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Bill Gross is used to buying bonds in multibillion-dollar batches. But when it comes to U.S. Treasury bills, he’s getting nervous. Gross, a founder of the investment giant Pimco, is so concerned about America’s national debt that he has started unloading some of his holdings of U.S. government bonds in favor of bonds from such countries as Germany, Canada and France. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
That was the message many people took from the triumphalist pageantry of Beijing’s 2008 Olympics. But the real game-changer was economic. The financial crisis, global recession, and China’s remarkable recovery have produced a big shift in the world’s most important state-to-state relationship. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
From Whole Foods recyclable cloth bags to Michelle Obama’s organic White House garden, modern eco-foodies are full of good intentions. But though it’s certainly a good thing to be thinking about global welfare while chopping our certified organic onions, the hope that we can help others by changing our shopping and eating habits is being wildly oversold to Western consumers. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Recently, the 10-year anniversary edition of Naomi Klein’s No Logo appeared in bookstores, complete with a new introduction by Klein herself. Originally released in early 2000, No Logo was an impeccably timed report on a growing youth movement that was rising up in response to the new-world-order agenda of liberalized trade, corporate outsourcing, and political deregulation that became known as “globalization.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A good deal of that old baggage has already been discarded. More Americans than ever now see beyond India’s third-worldish rhetoric and appreciate its quiet affection for power and realpolitik. Ever more Indians appreciate the genuine opportunities for strategic, economic and political partnership with the United States and the West in general. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so self-evidently at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, both essentially the same and basically good. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As the battle over health-care reform crescendoed last month, President Obama let slip that he was still making time for some side reading. “We’ve been talking about health care for nearly a century,” the president told a crowd at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania. “I’m reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt right now. He was talking about it.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Hunting is usually taboo in the simplicity movement because it involves guns. However, if you’re hunting boar in the upscale hills ringing the San Francisco Bay so as to furnish yourself a “locally grown” boar paté,” then you’re doing a fine job of returning to the simple life. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
On the morning of January 27th—an aeon ago, in tech time—Steve Jobs was to appear at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in downtown San Francisco, to unveil Apple’s new device, the iPad. Although speculation about the device had been intense, few in the audience knew yet what it was called or exactly what it would do, and there was a feeling of expectation in the room worthy of the line outside the grotto at Lourdes. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
