© Dan Abbe Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan A couple of months ago, I walked into Totem Pole Photo Gallery , a small photography space in Tokyo. Tucked away in a side street about 20 minutes away from the city’s bustling Shinjuku district, Totem Pole is a comfortable space, with floor-to-ceiling windows that…

Consider this: according to Discogs.com, about 800 remixes were released in 1983. In 1990, more than 4,000; in 2000, almost 15,000. And in 2010, there were 22,750 remixes released, an increase of more than 450% in twenty years. Not surprisingly, as that number has leapt up, remixes also have come to…

Hundreds of pages of internal White House memos show Obama grappling with the unpleasant choices of government. Credit Illustration by The Heads of State On a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post…

So at last, your paper is written. It represents the culminationof many years’ work. You think is an important advance for the field. You writeit up. You carefully format it for your favoured journal. You grapple with thejournal’s portal, tracking down details of recommended reviewers and then…

While clearing closets at my parents’ house in Nara in December following my mother’s death the month before, I came across a large square card in a pile of old documents. A snapshot of a baby looking at a birthday cake was glued in the center of the card, and I recognized that it was me at the time…

Research Studies Centers and Projects Research by Topic Recent Books Reading Lists Latest Study Marginal Tax Rates and Income New Time Series Evidence Karel Mertens To what extent do marginal tax rates matter for individual decisions to work and invest? The answer is essential for public policy and…

My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915–1933 edited by Sarah Greenough Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 13, 2011–January 2, 2012 Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction edited by…

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Anthony Dickson/AFP/Getty Images A man wearing a mask of Steve Jobs pretending to present new iPads outside an Apple store in Hong Kong, in a protest against conditions at Foxconn factories in China where Apple products are made, May 2011 Within hours of the death of…

What would you think if you met someone who stated convincingly that they believe stealing was wrong, and yet you knew that they were prone to theft, and did so in an entirely nonchalant manner? And when asked after stealing something whether they still believe stealing is wrong, they reply…

Cody: a life reframed by death. Photograph: Dorothy Hong J oshua Cody issues a warning to readers who pick up [Sic] , his cleverly entitled memoir of cancer and recovery. "I'm not really a writer," he writes. "I'm just writing this one thing and that's it." Later, he suggests that writing is too…

Lockdown The coming war on general-purpose computing By Cory Doctorow - This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011. General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what…

Consider this: In over five million years of human evolution, only one organ has come to exist for the sole purpose of providing pleasure – the clitoris. It is not required for reproduction. It doesn’t have a urethra running through it like the penis, and thus, does not urinate. Its sole function –…

I got a little nostalgic over the weekend. As I was working on Solaris 11 x86 over the past few weeks, I got a little bit peeved about how much Oracle has changed the OS. Command like ifconfig doesn’t not appear to be very functional anymore and instead ipadm has taken over most of the configuration…

Node.js has been getting great press for being used to build real-time web applications and fast networking tools that help big web sites run and scale. But is Node just as good a fit for web agencies and developers that build dozens, scores, or even hundreds of sites a year? Making the switch away…

Fear and Time Risk Culture and the Broken Doomsday Clock Will Boisvert Things are getting bad — really bad — according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists . This past January, the journal reset the Doomsday Clock, its symbol of the imminence of global catastrophe, to a heart-stopping three…

UPDATE 2/8/2012: Simon & Tibshirani posted a critical commentary on this paper here . See additional thoughts here . Real-world data are messy. Relationships between two variables can take on an infinite number of forms, and while one doesn’t see, say, umbrella-shaped data very often, strange things…

THE SISTERS ISSUE The Most Notorious Sibling Rivalry in Hollywood History On the eve of her 100th birthday, Olivia de Havilland recalls her relentlessly competitive relationship with sister Joan Fontaine. In Conversation Hamilton ’s Washington Has Some Thoughts on His Character Christopher Jackson…

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance…

Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff Nicole Maines, 14, her twin brother, Jonas, and their parents have traveled a long, trying road. Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born identical twins, but from the start each had a distinct personality. Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and…

Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.…

Here's a fairly standard science story. A researcher compares a group of 30 children with autism/dyslexia/depression/chilblains and a matched control group on something: genotype/reactions to pharamaceuticals/behaviour profile/brain activation. A statistically significant difference is found between…

Japanese version The other day, I was asked to speak at the Hokkaido Color Universal Design Organization . At the HCUDO there is a facility named the “Color Vision Experience Room” and I had a chance to experience it firsthand. The event I spoke at had, as its main objective, public education about…

A Response to Alva Noë’s “Art and the Limits of Neuroscience” December 5, 2011 | Alva Noë A philosopher wrote a blog post on the New York Times’ website, and I don’t agree with him. I started this website–The Beautiful Brain– two years ago with the intent to explore the very pursuits this…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience. “Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to…

Philippe Wojazer/Reuters Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his wife, Anne Sinclair, in the courtyard of their Paris residence, September 2011 May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund and leading contender to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as…

WWII Poster On December 7, the nation will remember the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the beginning of World War II. What happened in the U.S. territory of Hawaii that day was not the beginning of American involvement in World War II, however. And Japan, on her own, did not bomb Pearl…

Le Carré in Hamburg, in 1964. He had served with the S.I.S. for five years, and Smiley had already appeared in his novels. Credit Photograph by Ralph Crane / Time Life Pictures / Getty The opening sentence of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” a 1974 novel by John le Carré, runs as follows: “The truth is,…