archive

Jaw-dropping recent progress

From Folio, a cover story on why would anyone launch a print magazine today? A review of The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson. A review of The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera by Edward Muir. Ronald Bailey on exposing Obama's genome — and Oprah Winfrey's, Brad Pitts', and yours. If you can draw, then you should be in school: The case for making American universities into patrons of the arts. From Scientific American, does exercise really make you healthier? Shankar Vedantam on how high-status criminals face greatest public wrath. Reading isn't fundamental: How to help your child learn to read. After decades of discouraging setbacks, plasma physics has made jaw-dropping recent progress — could it save the world? More on Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander. Searching for Jesse Camp: Personal desperation led to a quick, shallow obsession with MTV’s most unlikely (and annoying) star. An interview with Salman Rushdie: "Provoking people is in my DNA". A review of The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis. From TED, Susan Blackmore on memes and "temes"; and Stephen Hawking is asking big questions about the universe.