Natural history of the present
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Sydney’s Daily Telegraph is suffering one of their frequent relapses into frothy-mouthed panic about government wastage on research grants.
Le Lac des cygnes ballet - Jean-Paul Andreani and Claire Motte performing on stage at Opera de Paris, France, 1960. Photograph by Christjeudi10 Wikimedia Commons.
Move over Nate Silver! The statistician and author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don’t may have called 49 out of 50 states right in the 2012 US Presidential election…
Introduce me to an opponent of same-sex marriage and I will show you a married person. Or someone whose bucket list has “Get Married” right at the very top. The paradox would be delectable if its consequences…
As if it weren’t hard enough. Being assessed and judged all the time, on our looks, our deeds, our works, the contents of our refrigerators. We are also judged by the company we keep, and in ways that…
That most confected of artificial television spectacles, the MTV Video Music Awards has mercifully passed for another year. Miley Cyrus returned as host to the scene of her infamous 2013 performance where…
Today, millions of very nervous adults are furtively checking sites like “Have I been Pwned” to check if their account details at Ashley Madison have been leaked. Others are checking if their partners…
What gets you out of bed in the morning? Before morning has broken, and some time before blackbird has spoken, songbirds rise for sex. And a clever new experiment reveals just how important it is for male…
By any metric, Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons article in Science, a copy of his address as 1968 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, rates among the most important…
Is alcohol-fuelled violence caused by the booze itself or by the macho culture in which the drinking occurs? If we are to believe a recent study commissioned by the alcohol company Lion, it’s the culture…