"The May 1 riots in Berlin's Kreuzberg district have become an annual ritual. … Now an American anti-capitalist activist has started giving tours of the neighborhood's hot spots to foreign visitors."

"The term 'slow travel' is tied to a burgeoning movement to return to a time when life’s pleasures were savored, to a time when people appreciated the going as much as the getting there," writes Nancy Keates.

"What's the difference between a frog, a chicken, a mouse and a human? Not as much as you'd think, according to an analysis of the first sequenced amphibian genome."

La Santa Muerte, Holy Death, "is only one among several otherworldly figures Mexicans have been turning to as their country has been overwhelmed by every possible diffi­culty."

Paul Krugman writes that the Greek crisis demonstrates the dangers of nations putting themselves in a "policy straitjacket."

On Monday, Republicans voted to prevent financial reform legislation from moving to the Senate floor for debate. The Democrats’ motion to bring about cloture—which would end the Republicans filibuster of […]

Around the turn of the 20th century, if you were in the upper class in America, you’d have probably, at some point, sat down to a nice dinner of Diamond […]

Why don’t people notice that Apple has no qualms pressuring the police to barge into the homes of journalists? Or that we are now automatically signed on with our Facebook ID on 50,000 websites, all of which have added this functionality just in the last week? No, we are too busy standing in line for hours to buy the iPad or checking if our Facebook friends like Lady Gaga as much as we do to take stock of what’s really happening behind the curtains.

Here’s what’s great about Janet Malcolm’s piece this week about the murder trial of Mazultov Borukhova and Mikhail Mallayev in The New Yorker: It captures a truth about trials that […]

Rachel Maddow discusses the snowballing campaign to boycott the State of Arizona over its radical new racial profiling law. The law, which takes effect this summer, would allow a police […]

Faulkner would sacrifice his grandmother for his fiction—Anne Lamott, however, would not. For writers who, like most of us, have the goods on their family and friends, “honest can be […]

Big Think’s Peter Hopkins will interview journalist and tech entrepreneur John Battelle in Mountain View, California this afternoon for the HP-sponsored webcast “New Marketing in the New Normal.” Battelle, the […]

After months of struggling with unending debt, the time has come for Germany to step in and help Greece. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, was less than happy about […]

I’m just getting on a flight from Medellín, Colombia. No, I wasn’t hanging out with drug lords, war lords, or Nazis who fled Germany after World War II. I was […]

I was tooling around the internet for awhile yesterday, looking for a transcript of the Congressional hearings that featured Goldman Sachs executives and traders as the star witnesses, before I […]

A recent study of multiple sclerosis has found no genetic dissimilarities between identical twins who have and don't have the disease.

Tim Logan writes that the trouble with talent attraction as an economic development strategy is that talent seeks opportunity—and without jobs, a "creative class" city will wither.

"Even if all computerized route maps eventually learn to mimic the most useful aspects of our homemade creations, we'll keep drawing maps for one another and for ourselves," writes Julia Turner.

"Americans must be willing to show a greater appreciation for the things government rightly does on our behalf and have an honest discussion about how to pay for them," writes Dennis Jett.

James Bridle writes that publishers need to look beyond one-size-fits-all definitions of their product, and take a long look at where and how people are reading.