1–9 of 9
Following in the grand tradition of nearly every new technology, nobody started to panic about the potential downsides of cognitive outsourcing until kids starting doing it, and doing it in ways that their parents didn't understand. They type with their thumbs in ugly slang and funny symbols. They have short attention…
Negative reviews are fun to write and fun to read, but the world doesn’t need them, since the average work of literary fiction is, in Laura Miller’s words, “invisible to the average reader.” It appears and vanishes from the scene largely unnoticed and unremarked. “Even the novelists you may think of as ‘hyped’ are in…
You would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear…
Filters in a digital world work not by removing what is filtered out; they simply don't select for it. The unselected material is still there, ready to be let through by someone else's filter. Intelligent filters, which is what we need, come in three kinds: A smart person who takes in a lot and tells you what you need…
Not long ago, a young boy handed me an envelope containing 300 euros. He said he wanted it to be used to help the orphans at our ashram. I asked him to keep the money, which he had won in a music competition, but he refused. Two weeks later, his little sister came to me with an envelope containing her ice-cream pocket…
Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off. [...] ...even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans…
In a recent study of sitcoms, the National Fatherhood Initiative found that fathers were eight times more likely than mothers to be portrayed negatively. In fact, if you just think of the most prominent television dads, you'll find what In fact, if you just think of the most prominent television dads, you'll find what…
One prominent researcher on the public understanding of science has even found that due to their failure to understand basic scientific terms or the nature of the scientific process, 80 percent of Americans can't read the New York Times science section.
The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other's steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of…