Issue_56

17 articles
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    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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    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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    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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    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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    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 […]
  • Zuther_HERO

    The Antelope Killing Fields

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

  • Berger_HERO

    Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary

    The neuroscientist explains why feelings evolved.

  • Damasio_HERO

    Why Your Biology Runs on Feelings

    Think feelings are important? You’re more right than you know.

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    The Antidote to “Black Mirror” Virtual Reality

    We will take VR far, in creative and unanticipated ways, but it will also be mundane, contrary to the bleak alarm peddled by Black Mirror.Image courtesy Netflix / YouTube Both of Black Mirror’s virtual-reality episodes, “USS Callister” this season and “Playtest” in last one’s, presume VR users will be alone, immobile, and unaware of their […]

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    The Real Difference Between You and a Plant

    The best way to draw the line sounds less biological than poetic: What separates us is the “difference between staying and going,” as Hope Jahren, the geochemist and geobiologist, puts it.Vincent van Gogh / Wikicommons One way to rouse someone is to ask: “What makes you think you’re so different from a plant?” Several sensible […]

  • FIrebrace_HERO

    The Radical Humanism of the Soviet Planetarium

    This planetarium was hailed as a successor to Russian theater and the Orthodox Church.