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But does Amazon know when you're tired or hungry?

The more social behaviors a voice-user interface exhibits, the more likely people are to trust it, engage with it, and consider it to be competent.

Despite losing most of his extended family to the guillotine, Tocqueville grew up to become a fervent supporter of democratic revolution.

It is time to give the Russian cosmologist the credit he deserves.

Reveri Health has launched a new stress-relief self-hypnosis program through Amazon Alexa to help combat the anxiety of COVID-19.

The new feature uses Amazon's neural text-to-speech technology, which allows it to produce phrases that weren't priorly recorded.

Why do all of our virtual assistants have a female voice?

Polls show that more Americans today define socialism as an ideology of "equality" than one espousing government control of the economy.

On Monday morning, YouTube removed Infowars and The Alex Jones Channel from its platform, following similar bans from Apple, Spotify and Facebook.

In a historic upset, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young democratic socialist of Latina descent, has defeated political veteran Joe Crowley in their party's congressional primary in New York City.

It marks the third such defamation against Jones, but it's not clear the plaintiffs will have an easy case ahead of them.

Are virtual assistants teaching children to be nasty?

Fashion designer Tina Gorjanc has introduced a line of leather handbags and jackets made from late designer Alexander McQueen’s lab-grown skin.

How one researcher created a pirate bay for science more powerful than even libraries at top universities.

"I also strongly believe that science is no longer a vocation where an individual sits in a darkened lab with his instruments, tinkering away at some big question.  Science is collaborative, and will become more so."

"You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you … It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps."

Sherman Alexie, author of the award-winning novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, on Young Adult fiction: "A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. is the Garden of Eden of literature... One person asked me, ‘Wouldn’t you have rather won the National Book Award for an adult, serious work?’ I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian — that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A."

"Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus." - Alexander Graham Bell

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint." - Alexander Hamilton (born on this date in 1755)

It is quite possible that future generations will view A-Rod, and his baseball peers who have used PEDs, as victims of circumstance. 

No doubt everyone has seen the two-part Piers Morgan interview of conspiracy-weaver, gun “enthusiast” and upcoming thespian, Alex Jones. The interview is truly bizarre: firstly, for making so many people […]

What is this thing called love?  I took my own stab at understanding the neurobiological circuits underlying love and sex with my own book, DIRTY MINDS: HOW OUR BRAINS INFLUENCE […]

If Julius Caesar hadn’t accidentally burned down the Library of Alexandria, the story goes, we long ago would have colonized Mars. That notion, popularized by Carl Sagan, among others, is that the […]

If you remember, I’ve decided to “celebrate” the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War by remembering failures of Southern and Confederate statesmanship.  My first post affirmed the […]

Most of you won’t believe this, but I’ve actually gotten several requests to say more about Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, rightly called the best book ever written on […]

“For the most part, a lot of those early users were actually Steve and me with aliases. We had silly user names that we just generated in order to make […]

A conversation with the co-founder of Reddit.

It’s usually a tie between watching paint dry and watching grass grow for the title of most boring thing to do ever.  Watching the paint dry and, more importantly, flow […]

As Secretary of State under President Reagan, Chief of Staff for Nixon and Ford and a four star general, Haig was a war hero and once wrongly assumed control of the Presidency.

A discussion with Alex Matthiessen, Riverkeeper of New York’s Hudson River and President of the organization Riverkeeper.