Distraction is a much better tactic for calming children than conventional reassurance, which often heightens fear, researchers have found.

To be alive spiritually is to feel the ultimate anxiety of existence within the trivial anxieties of everyday life, believes Christian Wiman.

Facing economic woes, the Kremlin has decided that Russia needs the equivalent of a Silicon Valley. Leon Aron doubts it can succeed unaccompanied by a spirit of free inquiry.

Profits have plummeted since tools like Napster appeared, and peer-to-peer file sharing has weakened copyright, but has it also benefited all of us, as two academics argue?

Will readers have to flounder in an ocean of slush before the new gatekeepers appear to rescue them? It's getting harder to be a discerning reader in the digital self-publishing era.

“Why would a top military commander allow a journalist so much unfettered access to his inner circle?” Jeremy W. Peters on why Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal let down his guard.

Why was America so rattled by its disallowed goal in last week's World Cup match against Slovenia? Andrés T. Tapia blames violation of the American sense of "internal control."

Media consultant Frédéric Filloux dissects the dire situation of the French press (generalizable to most western media?) and the likely fate of the flagship daily, Le Monde.

A U.K. health watchdog's call for “life-saving” food labeling and other dietary changes has met with an unenthusiastic government response.

Peering at the future of liberal education, Eric Jansson predicts that close faculty-student and student-student interaction will remain the core no matter the fancy technology.

Having staggered through one recession—and without emerging the other side of it—Britain now seems destined for another. This time it will really hurt. A Martian arriving in London, or rather […]

This morning on Morning JoeNiall Ferguson compared General McChrystal to Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, a character uniquely immortalized by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s film (inspired […]

Any art lover who has been to Paris knows what it’s like to try to see everything in a finite time frame. Cruel choices must be made, masterpieces must be […]

If women ran the world, different things would be engineered and invented. Unfortunately, many female scientists get sidetracked.

From our leakage radiation, an alien would be able to tell quite a bit about the planet, including the length of our day, the size of the planet, and even […]

The potential detection of signals from outer space raises many questions. What’s the overarching plan? Who would speak on behalf of our planet? What would they say?

Researchers at SETI are using radio telescopes to listen specifically for signals that are "obviously engineered"—something that nature, at least as far as we know, can’t produce.

The board game has been a national pastime in Russia since well before the Bolshevik Revolution.

The American grandmaster was an impulsive individualist who had an incapacitating fear of losing, says the man who became world chess champion when Fischer refused to show up at the […]

The thirteenth world chess champion had an unrivaled mastery of opening-move theory and was unstoppable when he had the initiative. But "he was not so strong when his king was […]