In Greek mythology, the gods sometimes punished man by fulfilling his wishes too completely. This is the first line of Henry Kissinger’s 1957 Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Always controversial, […]

After a busy day where I finally send off my paper on zircon and the magmatic evolution of the Okataina Caldera Complex… A new Smithsonian/USGS Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcanic […]

Enjoying a piece of music or recognizing the face of a loved one seems like a simple, instantaneous process. But like all things associated with the brain, they aren’t. Both […]

Former CBS news correspondent Jere Van Dyk talks about the survival skills he used to get through a 45-day kidnapping ordeal in Afghanistan where his life was threatened daily.

Literature has always been slow to adapt to new technologies, which on the one hand might be its saving grace but could just as well lead to its demise.

“Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth and “Kalooki Nights” by Howard Jacboson are Safran Foer’s picks for the best novels about the Holocaust—even though they are not explicitly about the genocide.

Safran Foer likens the experience of watching films of his novels to hearing his own voice on an answering machine—except far stranger.

Comedy may be difficult to pull off, but comedians can at least gauge their success by the audience’s laughter. For writers, there is no similar criterion by which to judge […]

Though some claim factory farming is necessary to feed the Third World, it requires seven calories of input to generate one calorie of food.

Safran Foer says Pollan is the most important and sensible food writer in American history, but he disagrees with Pollan over the idea of “table fellowship.” “We’re past the point […]

A recent study calculated the environmental costs of a 50-cent fast food hamburger to be 400 times its price at the register.

Eating meat is a part of our cultural and personal identity—think Christmas hams or Thanksgiving turkeys—but the factory farming system is not sustainable.

Two volcanoes are keeping our attention right now: Sinabung, Indonesia Halfway around the world, activity at Sinabung continues to be cause for increasing concern. The volcano is experiencing larger and […]

In a panel discussion last night following Feisel Abdul Rauf’s appearance on CNN Larry King Live, host Anderson Cooper and new primetime personalities Kathleen Parker and Eliot Spitzer framed Rauf’s […]

One orthodoxy has long dominated neuropsychology: the brain controls the mind, which has no independent existence outside of the chemical reactions and patterns which constantly fire inside our brains. Neuro-biologists have long held that the brain exclusively drives the mind, and that the mind serves only the individual self.

Feisel Abdul Rauf returned to the United States last weekend and yesterday began the urgent process of telling his side of the story. As I wrote previously, power in politics […]

"My problem is that consumer technology moves in a single direction: It’s constantly making it easier for us to perceive the content." Jonah Lehrer laments the rise of e-books.

"Basically, we’ve bought into several misconceptions about excellence, which are not only wrong but affirmatively counterproductive." Peter Orszag on how to be successful.

"American investors have filed several lawsuits to pressure Germany to honor bonds issued by the Weimar Republic. Berlin says a deadline for registering the bonds passed decades ago."

"We have entered the post-art era, Kundera declares in Encounter—'a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying.'”