Perspective

17 articles
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    Communication

    How to Get Evangelicals to Care About Climate Change

    It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about the environment. It’s that they care about people more.Wikicommons Last year was among the three warmest years ever recorded, 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently reported. The two years prior were warmer (2016 the warmest), […]

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    Communication

    The Irony of the Pope Decrying Fake News

    It’s hard to ignore the irony of the leader of the Catholic religion decrying intolerant and hypersensitive attitudes, to which Catholic dogma has contributed for centuries.Illustration by DonkeyHotey / Flickr Pope Francis may be the first pontiff in Roman Catholic history to embrace the voice of the modern pundit. In 2015, he wrote an encyclical […]

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    Communication

    How to Use Blinkist Properly

    There’s a right way and a wrong way to use Blinkist. You’ll still want to do some reading, for one thing.Photograph by Jonathan Grado / Flickr The summer reading for my senior-year A.P. psych class was Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, the bestseller all about the “power of thinking without thinking”—both its triumphs (fine “snap” judgments) and […]

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    Philosophy

    Why Did a Billionaire Give $75 Million to a Philosophy Department?

    Philosophy matters. The new challenges of the genomics revolution, the rise of AI, the growth in inequality, societal fragmentation, and our capacity for devastating war all invite philosophical perspective.Painting by Otto Scholderer / Wikicommons Last week, for the first time in recent memory, a news story in this troubling period had me, a bachelor of […]

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    Math

    What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult?

    Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Physics contains equations that describe everything from the stretching of space-time to the flitter of photons. Yet only one set of equations is considered so mathematically challenging that it’s been chosen as one of seven “Millennium Prize Problems” endowed by the Clay Mathematics Institute with a $1 million reward: the […]

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    Zoology

    The Antelope Killing Fields

    Why did two thirds of all saiga antelope die in a couple months?