I f you were to anthropomorphize the contemporary American mainstream video game, it would look, I think, a bit like a harrowingly male, shaggily haired, extremely confident 18-year-old capable of any number of astounding displays of strength or agility. Smart, too, in his way. Not incurious about…

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden , a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last…

Intelligence Report An inmate describes how he survives the rigors of anti-Semitism on the yard, and ponders where the experience has brought him David Arenberg had everything going for him. He was smart, the son of a research scientist and a teacher. He graduated in 1980 from the elite University…

CBS banned SodaStream’s Super Bowl spot because, apparently, it was too much of a direct hit to two of its biggest sponsors, Coke and Pepsi. Please pause and read that sentence again. I am shocked that CBS would ban a spot for being too competitive. But I’m even more shocked that the advertising…

Dopamine gets blamed for fuelling celebrity addictions – including to cup cakes – but its brain function is more complicated that that. Photograph: foodfolio/Alamy I f there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. Supposedly released whenever we experience something…

Leif Parsons The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. If irony is the ethos of our age — and it is — then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living. The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia…