Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Sarah Palin’s ongoing struggle with the English language entered a new phase this week, when she called on her Twitter followers to “refudiate” the proposal to build a mosque on the site of the World Trade Center. Mockery followed, and a tweet in which she corrected herself and asked people to “refute” it. Not correct, either. Finally, she put an end to it by saying: “Refudiate, misunderestimate, wee-wee’d up. English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin words, too.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
My hope, when all is said and done, is that we will be remembered chiefly as the people who invented—who devised and thereby also, for the first time, discovered—the perfect game, the very Platonic ideal of organized sport, the “moving image of eternity” in athleticis. I think that would be a grand posterity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Tibetan children, decked out from head to foot in traditional tribal garb, danced for the nodding approval of women breastfeeding babies and long-haired, yet balding, men. Stalls sold stones (no ordinary stones – healing ones), scarves, CDs featuring the sacred chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, bangles, and books with titles such as The Magic of Healing and Contact with the Gods from Space. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The strong version of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s argument in The Spirit Level implies that President Obama’s fight to reform health care was pointless. Extending the availability of health insurance cannot substantially improve Americans’ health. Instead, the president would make us all happier, healthier, and longer-lived, their logic suggests, if he could get the richest, say, 5 percent of Americans to leave the country. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Kris Kuksi’s first artistic creation was a miniature model of a Winnebego, complete with tiny bathrooms made from construction paper. Growing up in rural Kansas in the 1970s and ’80s, imagination and glue were his tools for entertainment. He developed a knack for constructing intricate miniatures made from model kits, mechanical parts and toy soldiers. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What is not as frequently remembered is that, when Forster uses the phrase in Howards End, he is not actually talking about this kind of social connection, but about something more elusive and private—the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Without major compromises by all involved and the agreement to avoid the contentious issue of slaver, the framers would never have written and ratified the Constitution. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
If you’re looking for a contrarian take on technology, Nicholas Carr is your man. In 2003 the author touched off a debate about the role of computers in business with his article “IT Doesn’t Matter.” He caused another kerfuffle five years later with an Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Illusionists Penn and Teller barely communicate outside work – but after 35 years together they still create the most beautiful shows on earth. Ahead of their first British performances for 16 years, Benjamin Secher went to Las Vegas to ask them how they do it . <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The World Health Organization found itself Friday in the strange position of defending North Korea’s health care system from an Amnesty International report, three months after WHO’s director described medicine in the totalitarian state as the envy of the developing world. <<<To read full article, click here.>>> <<<Amnesty National report, click here.>>>
Singer does not call himself a vegan, that is, a person who goes beyond mere vegetarianism to eschewing any and all products derived from animals. But more and more people do, and precipitation from the debate continues to this day in scholarly circles and beyond. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The advertisement warns of speculative financial bubbles. It mocks a group of gullible Frenchmen seduced into a silly, 18th-century investment scheme, noting that the modern shareholder, armed with superior information, can avoid the pitfalls of the past. “How different the position of the investor today!” the ad enthuses. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
There was a day a few weeks ago when I found my 2½-year-old son sitting on our building doorstep, waiting for me to come home. He spotted me as I was rounding the corner, and the scene that followed was one of inexpressible loveliness, right out of the movie I’d played to myself before actually having a child, with him popping out of his babysitter’s arms and barreling down the street to greet me. This happy moment, though, was about to be cut short, and in retrospect felt more like a tranquil lull in a slasher film. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
For someone so obviously self-conscious, the consensus runs, Christopher Hitchens is quite parsimonious in giving a piece of himself. Even from laudatory reviews come a mildly clucking sound: It’s all well and good that you’re chums with Martin, Salman and Ian, but you haven’t really put yourself on the couch or “opened up,” have you? Rather hostile to psychoanalysis for a self-described “orthodox Freudian,” aren’t we? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
One fateful day in early August, Google Maps turned Arunachal Pradesh Chinese. It happened without warning. One minute, the mountainous border state adjacent to Tibet was labeled with its usual complement of Indian place-names; the next it was sprinkled with Mandarin characters, like a virtual annex of the People’s Republic. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Ernest Renan, in his pathbreaking “Life of Jesus” in 1863, also repudiated the idea that Jesus was the son of God while affirming the beauty of his teachings. In rather striking contrast, C. S. Lewis maintained in his classic statement “Mere Christianity”: “That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of hell. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The film critic Roger Ebert’s recent comments about video games and their potential as art, and especially the immense stir the comments caused on discussion forums all over the internet, shows the intrinsic interest there is in the question of whether video games are art. Of course, many people see the debate as entirely pointless, and there is the separate question of why we should want to establish that video games are art. But the question remains, and it is entirely sensible: are video games art? <<<To read full article, click here.>>> <<<Roger Ebert’s click here.>>>
The doctrinal contempt of Islamist regimes for popular festivals such as the Iranian nowrooz (new year) extends to suspicion of every expression of spontaneous life. The result is to conjure the very rituals of resistance they fear, says Asef Bayat. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with “acting white.” I knew that a book which did not focus on racism’s role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a “sell-out” and “not really black” because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the “acting white” slam did not even exist. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
No topic is liable to prompt a fist fight among mothers so rapidly as breast-feeding. Foot soldiers for the breast versus bottle debate line up like Roundheads against Cavaliers. Women who bottle-feed are often accused of lacking maternal instinct, while those who dare lactate beyond the three-year mark are viewed as hessian-clad feminists, only one short step away from running a lesbian commune in a yurt. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the aftermath of the Senate hearings to consider the president’s nominee to become the next U.S. Supreme Court justice, it’s hard to remember that the process wasn’t always like this. There weren’t always weeks of media coverage, and there weren’t always hearings. Nor did individual senators spend hours calling witnesses, making statements, or cross-examining the nominee. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Teaching military history when there are veterans in the classroom requires a greater sensitivity to the impact of language than may be the case with other students. I learned long ago to never insert words like “just” or “only” before giving casualty figures, for few veterans who have been in combat consider the death of a comrade as “only” one. In combat, all casualties taken by your unit are tragedies. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I doubt whether there is anyone in a modern society who is entirely free of snobbery of some sort, straight or inverted. After all, everyone needs someone to look down on, and the psychological need is the more urgent the more meritocratic a society becomes. This is because, in a meritocracy, a person’s failure is his own, whether of ability, character or effort. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
There’s a grand old tradition of celebrating the Fourth of July through dissent. Of famously dissenting July Fourths, the 1976 Bicentennial comes to mind, when World’s Fair-style displays of pyrotechnics and nautical parades were joined by civil rights protests nationwide. The most notable has to be the first Fourth of July, in 1776, when the founding fathers finalized the Declaration of Independence, which was, itself, met with a certain amount of dissent. Plenty of Americans were still loyal to the British government. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
If the Senate passes legislation establishing regular “workshops to enhance gender equity” in academic science, what exactly would scientists and engineers do at them? The legislation, already approved by the House, is a little vague beyond directing researchers and heads of academic departments to participate in “activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
