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Richard Dawkins lets go some invective against Pope Benedict XVI when asked by the Washington Post if the pontiff should be held responsible for the Church’s sex abuse scandals.
The FBI has opened a criminal probe of Massey Energy in connection with the explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine that killed 29 miners in West Virginia last […]
Beyond novelty, which is extrinsically valuable, lasting love must find ways to enjoy routine activities, which are intrinsically valuable.
The New Yorker looks at the history of The Boston Tea Party and how the event has been appropriated by people of different political leanings ever since.
Last night, among the eerie nighttime mummies and cave-drawings, a who’s who environmental panel convened at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss how to “move the conversation […]
The distances separating the stars are so vast that it would take a very advanced civilization—perhaps thousands or even millions of years more advanced than ours—to bridge those distances. In […]
Empathy is a complicated emotion, even for mice. On seeing another in pain, a mouse will act as if it itself is also hurting—much more, though, if it knows the […]
What kinds of incentives are necessary to get people to lead more environmentally responsible lives? Ernst Weizsäcker, co-chair of the U.N. International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, says that we […]
In order for Lyme disease to properly proliferate in an area, to the point that you have to check every square inch of your body for ticks when you get […]
Today I respond to Francis’ most recent post: an objection to the L.A. Times’ use of e-commerce links in its online edition to generate ad revenue. In this case, I […]
“Arctic amplification” refers to the fact that the region is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the planet—and as ice warms, exposing more ocean water, the process naturally speeds up.
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.”
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 […]
New research indicates that superstition may be able to influence the outcome of event. Study subjects who were told they were playing with a “lucky” golf ball, on average, sank more putts.
If David Cameron wants to beat Gordon Brown next month, he might want to play a lot of tennis. According to this paper, anyway, gestures and small movements are enough […]
The fight over Cape Wind – a $1 billion, 24-square-mile offshore wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound – has dragged on so long (9 years) that books have been written […]
Jim Titus, the EPA’s resident expert on sea-level rise, calculates that a three-foot rise in sea level will push back East Coast shorelines an average of 300 to 600 feet in the next 90 years.
Norman Steel and Benjamin Miller think New York’s garbage should be processed in waste-to-energy plants which produce energy, and are less polluting than landfills.
With exactly 40 Earth Days in its wake, the US has come a long way on conservation awareness. But when we think about Earth and all that ails her, we’re […]
This FIFA World Cup ad looks like a psychedelic collaboration between Adbusters and James Nachtwey. Way to bum out the entire species, FIFA. Photo credit: flickr user Dr. Motte, licensed […]
Stanley Fish is not surprised that the Supreme Court struck down a statute criminalizing the production and sale of “crush videos” depicting animal cruelty for sexual fetishists.
Wine grapes are extraordinarily temperature-sensitive, and as global warming intensifies the “premium-wine-grape production area [in the United States] … could decline by up to 81 percent.”
Two new studies suggest that chimpanzees face death in human-like ways, from holding deathbed vigils to comforting the dying.
Researchers have discovered a deep-ocean current carrying frigid water rapidly northward from Antarctica along the edge of a giant underwater plateau. They call it a climate change “fast lane.”
I recently wrote an opinion editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the recent eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano. This eruption was a bit different than most volcanic eruptions in […]
I never really thought about Warren Beatty as a great movie maker. My introduction to him as a kid was the movie Heaven Can Wait, a comedy that cemented in […]
The profile of Politico reporter Mike Allen in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine has drawn the ire of a couple prominent media authorities, who criticize Politico and Allen—as did […]