The philosophical writings of the author ofWar and Peace inspired followers from Moscow to Croydon and led to the creation of a Christian anarchist reform movement. Charlotte Alston examines the activities and influence of Tolstoy’s disciples. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the early 1970s, a group of medical researchers decided to study an unusual question. How would a medical audience respond to a lecture that was completely devoid of content, yet delivered with authority by a convincing phony? To find out, the authors hired a distinguished-looking actor and gave him the name Dr. Myron L. Fox. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I am in two minds about democracy, and so is everybody else. We all agree that it is the sovereign remedy for corruption, tyranny, war, and poverty in the Third World. We would certainly tolerate no different system in our own states. Yet most people are disenchanted with the way it works. <<<To read more, click here.>>>
Who among us is invulnerable to the puppy in the pet store window? Not everyone is a dog person, of course; some people are cat people or horse people or parakeet people or albino ferret people. But human beings are a distinctly pet-loving bunch. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
No group of believers has more reason to be sure of its own good sense than today’s professional scientists. There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition. What makes a method of enquiry count as scientific is not that it employs microscopes, rats, computers or people in stained white coats, but that it seeks to test itself at every turn. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“What is the definition of a good person?” Wang Jisi, dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University, asked at a graduation address in July. His answer: “He does not cheat in exams, or plagiarise another scholar’s work, or cut corners in construction projects, or sell fake goods or accept bribes.” All fairly uncontroversial, you might think, especially considering the occasion. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Four or five years ago, the term Sharia, which for Muslims denotes Islamic law, meant scant little to Americans. As I write this in the fall of 2010, America’s perceptions of Islam and Muslims have changed markedly. A few months from now, when Oklahoma voters march to the polls, they will face “question 755” on their ballots. Born out of the “Save Our State” constitutional amendment passed by the Oklahoma legislature earlier this year, question 755 will implore voters to forbid courts from using international law or Sharia law in their decisions. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Sentamu’s frustration emerges from several years of the “Anglican wars,” an ongoing conflict that is highly illustrative for people who want to understand why we all cannot get along, especially online. (For those of you who couldn’t pick an Anglican bishop out of a police line-up in Guangzhou, please bear with me. What I have to say is also relevant to you also.) <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain, which starts today, has provided much of the British cultural elite with a figure that it is okay to hate. Indeed, anti-Catholic prejudice is one of the main themes of today’s increasingly conformist imagination. It has reached a level where anyone who doesn’t possess a strong feeling of animosity towards the pope and his visit is viewed as a hopeless apologist for the abusive authority of theocratic despots. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As Wall Street hangs on the question “Will Greece default?,” the author heads for riot-stricken Athens, and for the mysterious Vatopaidi monastery, which brought down the last government, laying bare the country’s economic insanity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Since cities first got big enough to require urban planning, its practitioners have focused on growth. From imperial Rome to 19th-century Paris and Chicago and up through modern-day Beijing, the duty of city planners and administrators has been to impose order as people flowed in, buildings rose up, and the city limits extended outward into the hinterlands. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro’s level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I stand behind one of the ShotLink producers, Jason Stefanacci, and watch the shots roll in. The first round of the AT&T National is in progress, and 40 threesomes of pro golfers are making their way around the course. The par is 70, which means that the ShotLink team will record around 8,400 shots today. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It is one of those little ironies of historical memory that we sometimes forget why we took an interest in some things. Take flying saucers. How many of us realize that the reason they made headlines in 1947 was not because Kenneth Arnold thought he saw spaceships from another world; but simply because he reported objects traveling at “incredible speed”? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It doesn’t take remarkable insight to suggest that the defining idea of the coming decade will be the Internet. The Internet’s significance is already apparent, especially in higher education. Everyone now has access to the resources of the world’s greatest libraries. Collaborating with distant colleagues, and keeping up on the latest developments in your field, has become much easier. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her. Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author delves into the surreal new world Palin now inhabits—a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family—and the sadness she has left in her wake. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It has become my passion to expand evolutionary theory beyond the biological sciences to include all things human. Many people are puzzled about why this is necessary. After all, an enormous body of knowledge about humanity has accumulated without reference to evolution. Why is an evolutionary perspective needed now when it wasn’t needed in the past? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The first project is to understand what people do in the name of “morality.” We can look at the world, witnessing all of the diverse behaviors, rules, cultural artifacts, and morally salient emotions like empathy and disgust, and we can study how these things play out in human communities, both in our time and throughout history. We can examine all these phenomena in as nonjudgmental a way as possible and seek to understand them. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Since the beginnings of civilization, cities have been crucibles of progress both for societies and individuals. A great city, wrote Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century, represented “an inventory of the possible,” a place where people could create their own futures and lift up their families. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and sceptics, one possibility has been almost ignored – the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
There has been a rash of books on human evolution in recent years, claiming that it was driven by art (Denis Dutton: The Art Instinct), cooking (Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire), sexual selection (Geoffrey Miller: The Mating Mind). Now, Timothy Taylor, reader in archaeology at the University of Bradford, makes a claim for technology in general and, in particular, the invention of the baby sling – not, as you may have thought, in the 1960s but more than 2m years ago. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
September 15, 2008, is an important date in the economic history of the United States, and indeed the entire world. On that day the New York-based international investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, creating a panic in the nation’s financial system and an immense loss of wealth, and deepening an already serious global economic downturn. That day is also significant, however, for the history of American foreign policy. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The fourth-graders were unanimous: Quicksand doesn’t scare them, not one bit. If you’re a 9- or 10-year-old at the P.S. 29 elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., you’ve got more pressing concerns: Dragons. Monsters. Big waves at the beach that might separate a girl from her mother. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is one of the few poems of World War II to have achieved wide renown. It reads in its entirety: “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Everything I know about cutting grass I learned from my father. He had three rules and one quasi-rule. The three rules undoubtedly reflected his occupation as a systems analyst. Rule 1: To maximize efficiency and, thus, save energy, plot the yard into squares and mow inward from the outer edge. Rule 2: To prevent the engine from overworking and, thus, save gas, always position the discharge chute away from the square. Rule 3: To extend the life of the mower and, thus, save money, always service the machine according to the manufacturer’s specifications. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
