Every thriving political movement contains diverse and often warring elements bound together by little more than strength of feeling and the lure of power, so it would be stupid to look for unblemished ideological consistency in a political party. But it is hard to take such a view of ourselves. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The world’s first known human cannibals ate each other to satisfy their nutritional needs, concludes a new study of the remains of cannibal feasts consumed about one million years ago. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. <<<To read more, click here.>>>
Imagine you ran a restaurant. A very prestigious, exclusive restaurant. To attract top talent, you guarantee all cooks and waiters job security for life. Not only that, because you value honesty and candor, you allow them to say anything they want about you and your cuisine, publicly and without fear of retribution. The only catch is that all cooks or waiters would have to start out as dishwashers or busboys, for at least 10 years, when none of these protections would apply. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Like Mount Vesuvius but at briefer intervals, Prince Charles erupts in high dudgeon over various and sundry affronts to his very particular and sometimes very peculiar notions of how life should be lived. The ghastliness of modern architecture and the superiority of homeopathic medicine—in 2004 he endorsed an alternative cancer treatment that prescribes, among other things, daily coffee enemas—are but the foremost of his many contrarian beliefs. Perhaps because mental illness runs in both sides of his highly inbred family, his state of mind has been questioned more than once. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Evangelical progressives, evangelical conservatives, even evangelicals, set out their stalls in the marketplace of ideas, with many an intellectual trinket to tempt the jaded passer-by. Moreover, communism, the ideology whose death, according to American theorist Francis Fukuyama, was supposed to herald the end of ideology, is undergoing a modest recrudescence, with philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek leading the way. The liberal-democratic consensus is showing signs of strain. Intellectuals are going back to the future. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as “trimensional images”—avatars, in other words. “They live completely apart,” a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, “and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
American writer Nicholas Carr’s claim that the internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains has sparked a lively and ongoing debate, says John Naughton. Below, a selection of writers and experts offer their opinion. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
How to mark the passing of a universe that never existed? With invisible bells, and wreaths made of newspaper, and eulogies delivered from Styrofoam pulpits? Or with the slack jaws of 2 million viewers, a single thought in every brain: Okay … So now what do I do? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, has been sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the ‘progressive’ left.” A personal, twenty-year journey through the world’s wild places and the movements to protect them is also, for Paul Kingsnorth, an education in the limits of a project that has forgotten nature and lost its soul. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Where does moral law come from? What lies behind our sense of right and wrong? For millennia, there have been two available answers. To the devoutly religious, morality is the word of God, handed down to holy men in groves or on mountaintops. To moral philosophers like Kant, it is a set of rules to be worked out by reason, chin on fist like Rodin’s thinker. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination. To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It is not an altogether happy thought and one that, in minds less discerning than Geertz’s, helped license a parade of academic folly marching under the banner of “cultural studies.” From analyses of the power dynamics of Madonna to deconstructions of “Gilligan’s Island,” the field has produced work to make even the forgiving reader want to reach for a gun. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 1933, when Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had lunch with the first lady in the White House, the conversation turned to the conditions of the working class, and Eleanor Roosevelt said to Gertrude Stein, “Don’t you think there is something approaching nobility in the hard-working farmer or factory worker, struggling to support his home and family?” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In most surveys, nine out of ten Americans respond in the affirmative to the question “Do you believe in God?” The other 10 percent provide a variety of answers, including a favorite among skeptics and atheists. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In early 2009, the United States was engaged in an intense public debate over a proposed $800 billion stimulus bill designed to boost economic activity through government borrowing and spending. James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, Vernon Smith, and Gary Becker, all Nobel laureates in economics, argued that while the stimulus might be an important emergency measure, it would fail to improve economic performance. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Let’s say you spend a dozen years researching a book. It’s the first in a planned trilogy, the historical opus you consider your life’s work. The book is published to gushing reviews (“stunning,” “brilliant,” a “tour de force”) and becomes a national best seller. You win a big prize. You are living every scholar’s dream. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Saddam Hussein drained the unique wetlands of southern Iraq as a punishment to the region’s Marsh Arabs who had backed an uprising. Two decades later, one courageous US Iraqi is leading efforts to restore the marshes. Not even exploding bombs can deter him from his dream. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Reading the first three of these books about marriage, you might be tempted to reflect that there’s nothing new under the sun. Books of advice about finding love and keeping it have been around, offering formulas and nostrums to readers and believers, since the beginning of print, and so have statistics about the demise of marriage. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It’s the mother of all clichés. Almost no one can resist it. It’s wielded by everyone from thoughtful ex-generals to vitriolic bloggers. It crops up everywhere from Russia’s English-language TV channel to scruffy Pakistani newspapers to America’s stately National Public Radio. The Huffington Post can’t seem to live without it, and one recent book even chose it as a title. Afghanistan, we’re told, is “the graveyard of empires.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Earth has finite resources of matter. But thanks to its own internal heat and the light of the sun it has almost unlimited supplies of energy with which to remake itself over a vast range of timescales. Water lasts in the atmosphere for a fortnight or so; carbon dioxide stays in the oceans for thousands of years. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Employed as he is by the royal household, the laureate is obliged to write poems about the royal family, a practice that makes him an easy target for what Alfred Lord Tennyson, a laureate himself, called the “parasitic animalcules of the press”. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
According to Pascal Bruckner, we in the west suffer from neurotic guilt, a condition imposed upon us by the high priests of the left. This secular clerisy are heirs to the Christian tradition of original sin, which universalised guilt by claiming that humans are fallen and must redeem themselves. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
At the Last Supper, the Bible tells us, Christ announced to his disciples, “One of you will betray me.” According to a recent report in the International Journal of Obesity, he might have added, “And you will all grow fatter and fatter.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I was raised on words. They tumbled off the kitchen table onto the floor where I sat: grandfather, uncles, and refugees flung Russian, Polish, Yiddish, French, and what passed for English at one another in a competitive cascade of assertion and interrogation. Sententious flotsam from the Edwardian-era Socialist Party of Great Britain hung around our kitchen promoting the True Cause. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A former United States ambassador to Thailand tells of being asked to contribute to a local university in Bangkok that wanted to set up an “America corner” in its library—nothing more than a computer station and a few shelves of informational material. During the Cold War such a project would have been funded by the U.S. Information Agency. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about her husband’s more exotic ideas. “I am a hospice social worker. I work with people who are dying all the time. I see people dying All. The. Time. And what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As ethnic and sectarian solidarities and conflicts sharpen in this part of the world, it may be worth reminding ourselves of another way of being – ‘new Ottoman’ cosmopolitanism, with its complex relationship to colonialism. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Each week adds a new item to the growing list of grievances between the United States and China. The value of China’s currency, arms to Taiwan, human rights in Tibet, carbon emissions, military spending, sanctions on Iran, cyber attacks, and, of course, North Korea have all made headlines in the past few months. But there are far more profound problems that tend to get covered up by this landslide of daily disagreement. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman. That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had a soul, which he is not sure about. In fact, Eagleman’s brain is not completely sure that there is an Eagleman-beyond-Eagleman’s-brain at all—with or without a soul, whatever that term might mean. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
