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If you want to escape the negativity, head to Kazakhstan.

Happy reading!

NASA will use energy from Earth's gravity to launch the Lucy spacecraft in October of this year.

Monuments are under attack in America. How far should we go in re-examining our history?

Inequality from the Recession has a lot to do with how the government designed its response.

We're living longer than ever, but few of us will save enough to afford this historical boon.

Maya Angelou will be commemorated in a new permanent art installation in San Francisco. Poet and novelist, Angelou had a storied relationship with the city. She attended the George Washington […]

Why the effects of aging are detrimental to being the U.S. president.

Thousands of churches are left behind every year in America.

Sibling rivalries can lead to some impressive moments in history, how did these seven sets of siblings do?

Sponsored by the Hope & Optimism Initiative

Words of wisdom from Maya Angelou: "I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it."

Words of wisdom from Maya Angelou: "Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently."

Words of wisdom from A. Philip Randolph: "Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they do not know each other; they do not know each other because they cannot communicate; they cannot communicate because they are separated.” 

Words of wisdom from the late, great Maya Angelou: “I've learned that people will forget what you said; people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” 

Whoever the enemy is perceived to be, they are still a human being. Mandela spoke of peace and actively promoted forgiveness and reconciliation. 

“The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name,” wrote historian Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1962 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. The […]

Over the past two weeks on BigThink, I’ve shared the first two of a three-part dialogue between myself and the Danish psychotherapist Ole Vadum Dahl (read part 1 and part […]

James Ceaser, perhaps our most distinguished student of American politics on the conservative side, isn’t about predicting the outcome of elections.  That’s actually hard to do. And those political scientists […]

Fashion, like art, knocks the dust off of life.

So, here’s something you should know about me: I really don’t care for racists. A few years ago, a simpering neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom wrote to me, having somehow […]

We, the living, have won the history jackpot. As centuries go, the 20th century ranks as exceptional, a hard to fathom whirlwind. (The apocalyptic way Stalin and Hitler mass-murdered side-by-side.) […]

I was thinking of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who is now trying for a political comeback, while driving home from New Haven, listening to a blues hour out of a […]

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the comments to my last post, “Are You A Paster, Presentist, Or Futurian?” Some readers proclaimed their temporal orientation with pride. Others shared insights into […]

In this guest post, David Bellos, director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, demolishes the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. New Yorkers have more words for coffee than Eskimos do for snow, he says.

This trans-African colony could have rivalled Brazil for dominance of the Portuguese-speaking world.

I finally found one word to describe Memory as Medicine, the Radcliffe Bailey exhibition I saw last Saturday – colossal. More than mere paint on canvas, the huge multimedia selections […]

This fake controversy about the rapper Common and his invitation to a White House poetry reading had me thinking about “Sucker M.C.’s”, an old rap song by RUN-DMC. Sean Hannity […]

The top African-American chess player defied the conventional wisdom that you need to learn the game in preschool to become a grandmaster.

I became addicted to The Wire. I know, I ‘m late to the party. Very late, since the final episode aired over two years ago. But over the last few […]