Nothing Snowballs Online Like Fear
By Adrienne Berard Nautilus Fear-induced stress is at the root of mass hysteria. When we hear or read about a threat—that vaccines cause autism, that immigration begets terrorism, or that […]
Monthly Archives: February 2016
We are Hopelessly Hooked on our Smartphones
By Jacob Weisberg The New York Review of Books “As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Timegives us something to do with […]
Why China Hasn’t Reined in North Korea
By Sulmaan Khan Foreign Affairs Diplomacy on North Korea has assumed all the comic predictability of a Samuel Beckett play. Leader Kim Jong Un tests a nuclear bomb; the world […]
The “Just Following Orders” Defense and the Brain
By Joshua Barajas PBS Newshour In a 1962 letter, as a last-ditch effort for clemency, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann wrote that he and other low-level officers were “forced to serve as […]
China’s Great Stall
By Martin Wolf The American Interest The Republic of Korea and Taiwan are the only economies of appreciable size to have transformed themselves from low-income to high-income status inside two […]
What’s Justice for Kids Who Kill?
By Dana Goldstein The Marshall Project On Feb. 1, 2016, a Brooklyn jury convicted Kahton Anderson of second-degree murder and other charges in the death of Angel Rojas. Anderson slumped […]
USB Drives as Weapons Against North Korea
By Andy Greenberg Wired In the age of Dropbox and Google Drive, the USB stick has come to seem like a dusty tchotchke that belongs in the drawer with your iPhone 4 […]
Do Tasers Interfere With Your Ability to Understand Miranda Warnings?
By Nathan Collins Pacific Standard When you’re arrested by police and they read you your Miranda rights, you have two main options: You can keep quiet and demand a lawyer, […]
The Birth of Boko Haram
By Andrew Walker The Guardian In February 2009, I was at a motor park in Maraba, a satellite of the Nigerian capital Abuja, looking for motorcyclists wearing dried vegetables on […]
Why Young Men are so Prone to Crime and Fanaticism
By Joe Herbert Aeon Young men are particularly liable to become fanatics. Every dictator, every guru, every religious leader, knows this. Fanatics have an overwhelming sense of identity based on […]
