FAQ on the Bibi-Obama Spat
A look at the latest episode in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. More »
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Robert Wright is the author of, most recently, the New York Times bestseller The Evolution of God and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a former writer and editor at The Atlantic. More
Wright is also a fellow at the New America Foundation and editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv. His other books include Nonzero, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book in 2000 and included on Fortune magazine's list of the top 75 business books of all-time. Wright's best-selling book The Moral Animal was selected as one of the ten best books of 1994 by The New York Times Book Review.Wright has contributed to The Atlantic for more than 20 years. He has also contributed to a number of the country's other leading magazines and newspapers, including: The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Time, and Slate, and the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
If Osama bin Laden were alive today to survey the field of battle, he might not feel his movement was so defeated. More »
Have you ever, while taking off or landing in an airliner, felt any great confidence that everyone on the flight had actually turned off their cell phones, as instructed? More »
The latest results should be taken with a grain of salt, but even the most pessimistic of pro-Obama pessimists should feel a mild lightening of spirits. More »
Earlier this week, in questioning the significance of a "scientists find internet-addiction gene" story, I conceded that the scientific study in question did find something interesting: A gene that seems to be (very modestly) correlated with internet addiction also plays a role in nicotine addiction. Maybe this nicotine connection is what prompted the German scientist who was the lead author of the study to declare that, thanks to his work, we now… More »
Just a few quick and disjointed thoughts about President Obama's acceptance speech More »
Should Obama and his party contort themselves to please the "pro-Israel" crowd? Time will tell. More »
"German scientists find 'internet-addiction gene'," said a headline on a German news site last week. Another site reported that scientists have "nailed down the gene responsible for internet addiction." Is it true? No, but its falseness is interesting for what it says both about the nature of our addictions and about how scientific researchers sometimes help journalists sensationalize research. Here's what the German scientists found:… More »
Romney favors a more confrontational approach towards China and Russia--a stance that might actually run counter to Israeli interests. More »
Couldn't the GOP presidential candidate do better than spout abstractions? More »
I just spent a week about as off the grid as you can get. No internet, no cell phone coverage, no electricity, no running water, no walls, no roofs. I was in a wilderness area in Ontario, on a canoe trip with a few friends. I'd like to report that the experience left me refreshed and replenished, but at the moment the adjectives that come to mind are tired and sore. It turns out that "canoe trip" is an ambiguous phrase. Does it mean you'll spend lots of… More »
How certain shifts in perspective could make the world's economic and political ills--including the ongoing Euro crisis--a lot more solvable. More »
Though he's clearly bad for the Harvard brand, what about the Newsweek/Daily Beast brand? More »
Let's face it: The Democrats aren't going to win a clear-cut victory in the great Medicare talking-points war they were so looking forward to. More »
Pretty much everyone seems to agree that President Obama's biggest electoral handicap is the economy. Pretty much everyone also seems to agree that, actually, assigning blame (or credit) for the economy entirely to a president is unfair for a couple of reasons: (1) the president doesn't have anything like full control over national policy levers; and (2) national policy levers don't have anything like full control over the economy, which is also … More »
Israeli officials are strongly hinting that an attack on Iran's nuclear sites could be eminent. But this apparent push towards war should not be taken at face value. More »
Rory McIlroy might be the new man to beat on the PGA Tour. More »
He may be the GOP real thing but he'll strike a lot of people as plastic. More »
"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts," said Marcus Aurelius. If he's right, the path to well-being is straightforward: Avoid low-quality thoughts! Sadly, it's far from clear that he's right. Decades of research into the relationship between reasoning ability and well-being have failed to find a clear link. But now comes a ray of hope for high-quality thinkers--a study suggesting that Marcus Aurelius is right so long as… More »
I hadn't realized that the World Wide Web turned 21 this week until I saw the nice birthday card that Megan Garber sent it yesterday. And it's a good thing I did--because otherwise I would have missed a fabulous recycling opportunity! In the summer of 2001, shortly before the 10th birthday of the web, I did a Time Magazine profile of its creator, Tim Berners-Lee. Re-reading it just now drove home how young the web was back then, and how much it's… More »
