Topics
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Arts & Culture
Simon Doonan's Fashion Tips For Mad Scientists
about 1 hour ago
The hilarious swami of style and fashion egalitarian Simon Doonan, author of Gay Men Don't Get Fat, offers some efficient guidelines to personal style for the mad scientist whose mind is on loftier things. Read More
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Belief
Who is the Real Martin Luther King, Jr.?
18 days ago
What is the Big Idea? Some of the most memorable photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King are of him standing behind a podium with his fists clenched and his arms raised. This image of King is further reinforced by his famous I Have a Dream speech where he exudes power and confidence while ... Read More
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Business & Economics
The New Higher Education Playbook
2 days ago
"We have a fundamental misallocation of resources in higher ed. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars; the vast bulk of it is going to people who already have advantages, who already have so much, and yet we’re leaving people out of the system," says Andrew Rosen, CEO of Kaplan. Read More
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Environment
Technology for a Cause
19 days ago
The XO 3.0 tablet was one of the most talked about gadgets at this year’s Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. The tablet has a hand cranked accessory that powers the device which can run on Linux or Android. This is helpful for children living in rural areas of developing countries where there ... Read More
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Future
How the Internet will Change in 2012
about 1 month ago
What's the Latest Development? Internet industry research service Business Insider Intelligence peeks into 2012 and, among other things, predicts Google will release a $200 tablet; Facebook will hit 1 billion users; Twitter will build a huge business; Amazon will post serious losses but enjoy ... Read More
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Health & Medicine
This Is Your Brain During Orgasm
13 days ago
Editor's Note: A writer by trade, Kayt Sukel volunteered to masturbate in an MRI scanner for science. The point of the study? Neuroscientist Barry Komisaruk and sex therapist Nan Wise wanted to know what exactly goes on in the brain when a woman orgasms. Could the sensory cortex be activated by ... Read More
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History
The Humble Beginnings of China's Economy
12 days ago
What is the Big Idea? It turns out that ground zero for China's economic boom was in Xiaogang, a small, rural farming village in the Anhui Province. On the night of Nov. 24, 1978, farmers from 18 households in this village drafted and signed a secret document that changed the way their ... Read More
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Identity
The Devil's Highway: Truth and Consequences Across the Borderline
26 days ago
A guest post by Craig McDonald, author of El Gavilan. Cancións, narcocorridos and Americana border ballads: folk songs played out along both sides of an increasingly treacherous expanse of La Frontera. Hard but tuneful tales, some of them quite bloody, told to the strum of guitars, the soulful ... Read More
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Inspiration & Wisdom
Life's Too Short: How to Read the Right Books
about 9 hours ago
Let’s say you’re in the top fifth percentile of avid readers, tearing through a book a week on average. With such literary gusto raising your sails, you might feel like the entire world is an open book to browse at your leisure. But in actuality, you will hardly scratch the surface of available ... Read More
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Life & Death
Your Storytelling Brain
20 days ago
The left hemisphere of the brain is always trying to make sense of past thoughts and experiences. Cognitive Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga ponders our need to hear and tell coherent stories about ourselves. Read More
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Love, Sex, and Happiness
Should employers be entitled to punish women for poor choices?
2 days ago
I had a heated debate on Facebook this week over the issue raised in this opinion piece in The New York Times that argues that anti-discrimination laws don’t go far enough to protect women who lose their jobs because they are pregnant. The woman who tipped off the Facebook debate is a human ... Read More
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Media & Internet
Virtual Reality Contact Lenses Are One Step Closer to Reality
2 days ago
As Dr. Michio Kaku has been predicting for years, we are inching ever closer to producing virtual reality contact lenses that will add a layer of interactive, rich information over our mundane visual landscape. The newest innovation comes from a joint venture between DARPA (Defense Advanced ... Read More
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Politics & Policy
Outsourcing Talent in the Land of the Free?
4 days ago
The biggest problem facing the tech industry right now, says Kevin Ryan, CEO of Gilt Groupe, is a shortage of trained workers. Read More
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Science & Tech
Twitter – A Wiser Way to Censor?
4 days ago
On Thursday, Twitter posted a new censorship policy, stating that it will now have the ability to “reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” This is a change from Twitter’s previous policy of removing posts globally if it ... Read More
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Truth & Justice
Will Protests Spark Real Change in Russia?
about 1 month ago
What's the Latest Development? In the fortnight since the Bolotnaya rally, the Russian government response has gone from panicked to largely symbolic gestures and now to the start of something akin to actual concessions and real change, says Julia Ioffe. With thousands more at this weekend's ... Read More
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World
The Cyberspace Conundrum
12 days ago
China and Russia made the news recently for their relentless cyberattacks on US cyber systems. Earlier this month, viruses originating from these countries are blamed for the theft of personal banking information belonging to students and faculty members at the City College of San Francisco ... Read More