Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old…

Mortuary photo of the unknown man found dead on Somerton Beach, south of Adelaide, Australia, in December 1948. Sixty-three years later, the man's identity remains a mystery, and it's still not clear how – or even if – he was murdered. Most murders aren’t that difficult to solve. The husband did it.…

The idea of intelligence —that human beings possess, to varying degrees, an innate and universal ability to learn—has taken a beating in recent decades. Ever since Stephen J. Gould's Mismeasurement of Man (Norton, 1981) and Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic…

John Sypal shares, “In the most literal sense I feed, shelter and clothe myself through a job that is not involved with photography, so my name would go under the serious enthusiast column. While physical nourishment is kept up through a 9 to 5 job, a great deal of a different kind of hunger is…

I n October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts…

Recently on this blog , danah boyd set off a firestorm by suggesting that the imposition of real names on social media sites is an abuse of power…or even authoritarian. The obvious retort is “don’t like it, don’t use it”, or learn how to segement one’s network (i.e. bend to the system, because its…

No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. The operatives had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course. Credit Photoillustration by John Ritter Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters…

Last week, Linda Henneberg, a young science communication intern at CERN in Switzerland -- best known these days as the home of the Large Hadron Collider -- wrote a blog post about her experiences at the laboratory as both a woman and a non-PhD physicist. Haltingly, timidly, even a bit…

Tim DeChristopher, who was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for 'disrupting' a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2008, had an opportunity to address the court and the judge immediately before his sentence was announced. This is his statement: Thank you for the…

Slavoj Žižek ... 'The suggestion that capitalism is ready to collapse is perhaps, I admit it, wishful thinking.' Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian "T here is an anarchist leftist group here in London who hate me," says Slavoj Žižek with a giggle as we settle into a dilapidated leather…

JOHN LE CARRE interviewed by PIP AYERS In 1979, 11 million viewers watched the BBC's enthralling adaptation of le Carré's definitive spy novel. Now it's the British film event of the year. Here, in his unmistakable style, the reflections of the man who first taught us about moles, honeytraps and a…

It was January 2010, and investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency had just completed an inspection at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran, when they realized that something was off within the cascade rooms where thousands of centrifuges were enriching…

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler Have you heard that divorce is contagious? A lot of people have. Last summer a study claiming to show that break-ups can propagate from friend to friend to friend like a marriage-eating bacillus spread across the news agar from CNN to CBS to ABC with predictable…

Robert Nozick. 1. Recently, I overheard a fellow Amtraker back off a conversation on politics. "You know, it's because I'm a libertarian ," he said, sounding like a vegetarian politely declining offal. Later that afternoon, in the otherwise quite groovy loft I sometimes crash at in SoHo, where one…

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “ Baka malamig doon ” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend,…

Last month, when the New York congressman Anthony Weiner finally admitted that he had lied, that his Twitter account had not been hacked, that he in fact had sent a picture of his thinly clad undercarriage to a stranger in Seattle, I asked my wife of six years, mother of our three children, what she…

Love is any of various emotions that relate to feelings of strong attachment to another. The origin of such feelings probably lies in their benefit to inclusive fitness—the sum of an organism’s reproductive output and that of relatives with shared genes. Love motivates individuals to care for and…

‘I’m not sure there’s any way to be prepared for something like this,” Jon Huntsman told me last month. He was reflecting on his debut a few days earlier as a prospective presidential candidate: a gorgeous Thursday evening in New Hampshire when his chartered plane touched down at a little airport…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. It happens rarely, but when it does it causes a commotion of great proportions; it attracts the attention of all, becomes a popular topic for discussion and debate in marketplaces and taverns.…

More and more Americans are going to college, but how many of them are actually learning anything? Credit Illustration by BARRY BLITT My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever…

Below is the first in a series of self-standing excerpts from my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (Pantheon, 2005), that, in an experimental act of re-publishing , I will run a dozen or so of these over the next several weeks, partially serializing the…

The Lanesborough Hotel Saturday evening, May 14 2011 It takes quite a bit to excite the staff of The Lanesborough Hotel, one of London’s more self-consciously luxurious five-star residences. Princes, sultans, presidents, oligarchs and film stars have been coming here ever since the grand but oddly…

It was bedtime for Krista and Tatiana Hogan, and the 4-year-old twin girls were doing what 4-year-olds everywhere do at bedtime. They were stalling, angling for more time awake. Their grandmother, Louise McKay, who lives with the girls and their parents in Vernon, a small city in British Columbia,…

Louai Beshara/Getty Images A Syrian soldier waving a flag at a rally in support of President Bashar al-Assad, Damascus, March 29, 2011 “Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still she lives,” wrote Mark Twain after visiting Syria’s capital in the 1860s. “She has looked upon the…

A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to…

Until cancer attacked his vocal cords, the author didn’t fully appreciate what was meant by “a writer’s voice,” or the essential link between speech and prose. As a man who loved to talk, he turns to the masters of such conversation, both in history and in his own circle. Illustrations by Mark…

Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in. It is almost never filmed as itself. That is because, lovely as it is, it…