Category: Society

Steve Weinberg was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose book “The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of…

DoorDash is acquiring Instacart for $17 billion ($65 per share). The companies plan to keep separate brands and apps until…

Have you ever been walking through a supermarket, standing in a crowd, or simply passing through a place where people…

We are becoming a society in which algorithms know more about our behavior than we do—and increasingly have the power…

The collapse in earnings from collecting wastepaper exposes a larger problem in one of the world’s wealthiest cities: how to…

Some 4,500 years ago, two Sumerian city-states in what is now Iraq went to war over fertile land and access…

Ten years ago, we were warned that technology companies were turning our personal lives into a commercial product. Today, we…

Beneath the wars, political turmoil, and endless predictions of catastrophe, humanity continues its remarkable journey of progress. More than a…

Nearly six decades after students brought France to the brink of political upheaval, a new generation is taking to the…

As discerning readers of my new and largely unnoticed personal mini blog may have noticed I use a lot of…

The decline of serious nonfiction publishing raises an uncomfortable question: Are we losing interest in understanding the world, or are…

More than 200 years ago, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein—one of the most enduring cautionary tales in literature. Today, as artificial…

In a California laundromat during the summer of 2020, a stranger noticed Drew Calvert reading a novel and asked whether…

“How to Suppress Men’s Writing” by Adam Szetela (Quillette, 23 October 2026) Szetela argues that the Big Five publishers (Simon…

America has produced some remarkable consumer products. The automobile, the personal computer, the smartphone, and countless inventions that have transformed…

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books offered Millennials something increasingly absent from modern life: enchantment. Hogwarts represented more than an entertaining…

Nearly a decade ago, philosopher Martha Nussbaum warned that fear and resentment were poisoning American democracy. In 2026, her observations…

Addressing the global concern that AI will wipe out humanity in the next decade or so I asked three AIs…

In an age of noisy politicians, self-promoting executives, and public figures who seem incapable of keeping their opinions to themselves,…

Western fascination with Eastern philosophy is nothing new. From Zen Buddhism and Taoism to feng shui and meditation, generations of…