While Italy is now famous for its use of the red tomato on pizzas and pastas, the food was introduced the country relatively recently. A historian on how we all came to love the tomato.

"Contrary to the Machiavellian cliché, nice people are more likely to rise to power. Then something strange happens: Authority atrophies the very talents that got them there."

"We think of writing as an author’s cognitive output, but it has a corporeal dimension—writing is an embodied practice." The Smart Set on the loss of novelists' female transcriptionists.

German architect Christoph Ingenhoven says the attitude which defines modernism is against superfluous design and that many Asian cities are modernizing in all the wrong ways.

"Sometimes it is possible to do good only in secret." Princeton's Peter Singer believes that complete transparency is utopian, but that a more transparent world is generally desirable.

Roger Ebert knows (and celebrates) the void beyond life. He recalls his own bout with cancer and near-death experience to comment on Christopher Hitchen's cancer diagnosis.

Consumption of marijuana should be legal, but selling it should not be. Mark Kleiman at The Atlantic fears marketers would peddle the vice just as they have alcohol and fast food.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that technological advancement has historically struck a blow against privacy, but that more transparency in society creates more trust among its members.

"How do you find contentment in an acquisitive society? By changing the things you spend your money on, says a U.S. academic." The Independent reports on the upside to the recession.

If a new suggestion is adopted to the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, many people who experience normal bouts of grief could be diagnosed with having a psychiatric problem.

Catherine Rampell, in the New York Times’ Economix blog, noticed something interesting about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest report on consumer prices. Overall, consumer prices grew 0.3% in July […]

It’s been over 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, yet the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), a military group which was originally created to defend Western Europe from Russia, […]

Over the past few weeks, we’ve beenmentioning the James Dyson Award, effectively the world’s most prestigious student-design competition. Yesterday, the winner of the award’s U.S. round was announced: The Copenhagen […]

New York, like London, is peopled by every race and denomination –and indeed by those who have none. Whatever your place of worship, if indeed you do, there are Churches, […]

“On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make […]

As digital technology increasingly responds to our behavior in realtime, the qwerty keyboard and other hallmarks of our analog experience of life may become relics of the past.

British philosopher Roger Scruton says false hope is the biggest danger to humanity and that doses of pessimism help keep us on track toward gradual positive social change.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's call for the exhumation and reburial of the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus in Paris recalls Molière's burial, which became a divisive political issue.

While no American representatives were reported in attendance, a recent meeting of the world's far-right political parties in Tokyo demonstrates that fear and violence know no borders.

"Maybe it's time waterbeds made a comeback." The Atlantic wonders why the bed that once boasted a better sex life and (eventually) a good night's sleep became so unpopular so fast.