As study after study shows, women receive an enormous amount of abuse for any online activity: whether as journalists, sex writers, performers. Just being a woman (online) is sufficient to […]

The Cyclops Polyphemus as a Metaphor for Western Civilization and its Linear Way of Reasoning “The Greeks only understand theories, but the Chinese are the people who own the technologies.” […]

Over recent years a new industry has exploded that sells educational interventions purportedly based on neuroscience to schools. In 2006 a paper published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience reported that teachers […]

Red-hot news Jan 26 – Beijing has sent another activist, Xu Zhiyong, to prison. He fought against corruption and social injustice. Washington and Brussels protested vehemently on Sunday, and on […]

A German top official with the Goethe-Institute in Shanghai once remarked that “marrying a Chinese woman will make you rich.” This statement was soon retracted, and the man repatriated, but […]

“Underdeveloped,” “immature,” “effeminate” – such adjectives from the life-sciences were often used to describe East-Asian cultures in the 20th century. By erroneously seeing ‘culture’ as an organic, living entity -a common metaphor […]

“Now, working elbow to elbow with billionaires, I was a giant fireball of greed.” –Sam Polk BREAK it down: Obscenely rich people from 2013 meet in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss […]

In a fascinating interview Stanford University psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann describes meeting modern day “witches”, taking a “magic” course, experiencing bizarre (non-drug-induced) hallucinations and generally “hanging out in the magical […]

Many things puzzled the British student, on exchange somewhere on the Continent: what people ate, how they dressed, why they drove on the right. But nothing more so than the […]

“Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to […]

“Every day I live in mortal fear of offending someone.”  An old friend of mine tells me this over dinner. He shouldn’t have to be afraid. He’s not bigoted or […]

How you can safely trick your mind into triggering a visual hallucination, using only math and neuroscience! “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of […]

According to urban legend, sports stars who appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated will subsequently experience bad luck. This seems counterintuitive but time and time again the Sports Illustrated […]

Scientists are widely known for their inclination to drone on about esoteric topics in a language of jargon. But every so often, they can surprise us with conciseness. 

In the long term, a life-changing earthquake in America's heartland is almost certainly inevitable.

The best thing you can do is to try to lock in place the resources necessary to sustain you through the startup phase, which is an extraordinarily risky moment. 

Robert Bruner: This third wave that I am witnessing is stemming out of computing power and digital communication technology combined with globalization, liberalization of trade and big demographic shifts, immigration and the like.  

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency."- General Douglas MacArthur (born on this date in 1880)

James Watson: Up until now, machines have made our lives a lot better. I don’t thing they’ve depersonalized us so far. 

When we look across the Universe, we find that things used to be closer together in the past. So how large do things appear when they’re very far away? “Life is […]