Category: ideas

The second half of Radio Lab’s latest, Are We Coins? (18m44s), explores the randomness at the core of our being. So don’t take Nietzsche’s wor...

I have been rocked by this morning by this blockbuster passage from Giles Fraser’s introduction to Nietzsche: Nietzsche’s objection here is that the...

Giles Fraser, blogging for the Guardian, has written the most fun primer on Nietzsche’s philosophy I have read. One gem: it doesn’t matter where or ...

Siege mentality apparent in company email patterns: Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds...

slick. when we praise something as “slick,” we delight in what is slippery, mercurial, tantalizing. we can neither contain nor explain it. a slick o...

Ikea could make a killing if they re-issued some of their 70s designs at a higher price point, in a smaller production run and with more focused distribution. m...

Jill Lepore: “Germ theory, which secularized infectious diseases, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.” The notion of god is like a bubble...

In a much discussed and very provocative essay about health care, Atul Gawande makes two very compelling arguments. First, that doctors and hospitals don’...

Jim Rossignol proposes a stunningly simple and brilliant hypothesis in Videogames And The Impossibility Of Escape From Planet Earth. Hint: inner space.

More on intelligence: this time plants. Previously: animals.

Charlie Kaufman has a proposal: consciousness is a retaining wall against emotion. He wants to use paradox and absurdity to hammer out the pins that keep that r...

The history of psychology suggests that we know very little about our brains. Eventually, this history will include what we didn’t yet know about the inte...

A big heartfelt, teary-eyed, ecstatic “thank you” to the activists who are criticizing Sotomayor for her ethnicity. The best way to accelerate the d...