“The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’” philosopher Alain de Botton argued in his meditation on sex , “the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of…

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky; drawing by James Ferguson It is hard to see yourself as others do, all the more so if you are the world’s sole remaining superpower. In unparalleled fashion, the United States today has the capacity to project its military might throughout vast…

To the Editor: Re “ The Reactionary Mind ” (column, April 24): The “neoreactionaries,” conservatives opposed to liberal orthodoxy whom Ross Douthat would like to see in academia, actually do exist in the academy: But we are called scientists. The reason that we tend to identify with the left is that…

Here is a remarkable fact about identical twins: they have the same DNA, and therefore the same ‘genetic fingerprint’, yet their actual fingerprints (such as they might leave behind on a murder weapon) are different, and can be told apart in standard police observations. Fingerprints are, of course,…

To fall in love feels like such a personal and spontaneous process, it is strange — and a bit insulting — to suggest that we’re only copying what the novels and the movies tell us to do. However, the differences in how people have loved throughout history suggest that our style of loving is to a…

‘Bernie Sanders is the only independent candidate who escapes the malaise of being bought.’Photograph: Allstar Picture Library B anking is the least understood, and possibly most lethal, of all the myriad issues at stake in this election. No candidate other than Bernie Sanders is capable of taking…

Eiko Ojala ORAN, Algérie — Après Tahrir, Cologne. Après le square, le sexe. Les révolutions arabes de 2011 avaient enthousiasmé les opinions, mais depuis la passion est retombée. On a fini par découvrir à ces mouvements des imperfections, des laideurs. Par exemple, ils auront à peine touché aux…

The Republican presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio, seated among his colleagues, above at center, was not as animated as Democratic members of Congress, below, at President Obama’s State of the Union address. Mark Wilson/Getty Images (top); Jonathan Ernst/Reuters In the week after the Dec. 2…

This post was first published at Consortium News. In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemology, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but anti-knowledge. This seldom recognized fact is one of the prime forces behind…

Jon Krause The Large Hadron Collider sprung back to life this month, smashing subatomic particles with nearly double the energy used to discover the Higgs boson , a landmark in understanding the makeup of the physical world. With the Higgs now in the bag, researchers are setting their sights on more…

In 2006, i was 50 —and I was falling apart. Until then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy. I knew who I was professionally. When I was 16, I’d discovered cognitive science and analytic philosophy, and knew…

Helena Sindelar: .@RichardDawkins More reasons to admire eloquent, phenomenally well read, almost unbelievably fair-minded Hitch. http://t.co/dERNrNHelD

Photo Credit Illustration by Ben Wiseman This article appeared in the Feb 22, 2015 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Really, Really Short Workouts Think you’re too busy to work out? We have the workout for you. Learn more and try it yourself. Intense, interval-style workouts — brief bouts of…

Paul Krugman: The Real America, Continued http://t.co/KlelDjiWEU

Home Features Physics Feature 30 October 2013 Past, present, future: modern science tells us they are only an illusion. Now some maverick physicists want to restart the river of time (Image: Universal Everything) By Michael Slezak The now delusion IMAGINE standing outside the universe. Not just…

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near…

Stephanie Sy: You have been called a philosopher, an entrepreneur, an author, a new-age savant, an endocrinologist, a mystic. Which of these titles do you prefer? Deepak Chopra: I think if you define yourself, you limit yourself. So, none of them. Or all of them? I would say infinite possibilities.…

I have been posting blogs about MATLAB with code examples for many years. Steve Eddins, my fellow blogger of Steve on Image Processing fame, developed and maintains an internal tool that automates a l

Olimpia Zagnoli EARLIER this month, I helped reunite the fraternal twins Ann Hunt and Liz Hamel, who had been apart for 78 years. Born in England in 1936, they were separated at birth when their unmarried mother decided she could not care for both. Ann, the “prettier” sister, was given away, while…

So-called liberals attack the whistle-blower duo -- and a brilliant Supreme Court justice saw it all coming Follow (Credit: AP/Kin Cheung/Salon) In the famous wiretapping case Olmstead v. United States, argued before the Supreme Court in 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote one of the most influential…

With less than a week to finish my screenplay for the last round of a big screenwriting competition, I stepped on a train with two members of a growing activism movement called Effective Altruism. Holly Morgan was the managing director for The Life You Can Save, an organisation that encourages…

Western philosophers have not, on the whole, regarded Buddhist thought with much enthusiasm. As a colleague once said to me: ‘It’s all just mysticism.’ This attitude is due, in part, to ignorance. But it is also due to incomprehension. When Western philosophers look East, they find things they do…

Paper books were supposed to be dead by now. For years, information theorists, marketers, and early adopters have told us their demise was imminent. Ikea even redesigned a bookshelf to hold something other than books. Yet in a world of screen ubiquity, many people still prefer to do their serious…

Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos I’m aware that a good many perfectly intelligent people can’t stand parenthetical comments while a story’s purportedly being told. —J.D. Salinger, “Seymour: An Introduction” I began thinking about pain and parentheses when I was reading (I’m tempted to say rereading, but…

Thomas Piketty is the author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Despite its heft, the book has become a must-read in the United States. Amazon can’t keep it on its shelves. Karsten Moran for The New York Times It is unclear how many people have actually read Thomas Piketty’s treatise “Capital…

Click the books to find them on Amazon As Managing Director and Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse , Michael Mauboussin advises clients on valuation and portfolio positioning, capital markets theory, and competitive strategy analysis. He has also authored three books -- Think Twice…

In 2010, the editors at Vogue Paris made a design decision that could soon lead to a wide-sweeping change in French law. A spread in the December issue starred a model named Thylane Blondeau. In one picture, she was sprawled on a tiger-skin rug, her dress exposing one shoulder, as a jewel-encrusted…

Do you believe in miracles? You shouldn’t — not in the strict sense of ‘miracles’, anyway. If you’re just using the word as a kind of hyperbole, that’s fine: believe away. People sometimes refer to the ‘miracle of birth’, but they don’t mean that a supernatural agent was involved. They just mean…