Modern Physics and 'The Illusion of Understanding'
Can laypeople truly comprehend the Higgs boson? 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.
Can laypeople truly comprehend the Higgs boson? More »
Shortly after the existence of the Higgs boson was quasi-confirmed, I wrote a short post noting, among other things, that I don't really understand what a Higgs boson is. This upset such commenters as Brad Watts, who wrote, "If you have no idea what the subject is about, then you shouldn't be writing about it." Happily, the commenter known as ugluk2 (apparently 'ugluk1' was already taken) leapt to my defense: Wright actually gave the… More »
As you may have heard, there is now strong evidence that a particle called the Higgs boson, whose existence has long been predicted on theoretical grounds, actually exists. Let me explain to you what the Higgs boson is. Just kidding! Nobody can explain to you what the Higgs boson is, because if they try they'll say things like: The Higgs boson is the particle that imparts mass to the other particles. And if you're thinking clearly you'll say:… More »
Both focus on an affluent commercial class and religiously conservative voters. More »
Concerns about efficacy and retaliation may reduce chances of war with Iran. More »
The chances of hostile conflict have grown, but only marginally. More »
Is the international community's lack of flexibility on sanctions and the right to enrich more to blame than Iran itself? More »
Because of its dual identity, Turkey will have an important role to play along Western and Islamic fault lines. More »
This isn't a defense of Jonah Lehrer in the sense of arguing that he's blameless for his fairly egregious pattern of "self-plagiarism" (or, as he might prefer to put it, his pattern of "high-fidelity recycling"). And I'm not addressing at all Lehrer's alleged instance of actual plagiarism, which is a much more serious matter. My only point is that the current journalistic environment encourages recycling, and renders his misdeeds less surprising than … More »
The U.S.'s diplomatic inertia might be strengthening Iran's desire to go nuclear. More »
The Moscow round of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program ended today without discernible progress, though diplomats kept hope alive by scheduling staff-level meetings between the two sides for next month. If you're wondering what neoconservatives and other Republican hawks are going to say about this you have two choices: You can spend the next 24 hours combing their blog posts and columns, or you can just take my word for it: they're all going to… More »
The most undercovered story in Washington is how President Obama, under the influence of election-year politics, is letting America drift toward war with Iran. More »
You could have spent pretty much all day today on Twitter reading derisive left-wing quips about David Brooks's New York Times column. My favorite tweet--and there were plenty of contenders for that title--was from the journalist Brendan Koerner (@brendankoerner), who summarized Brooks's point as, "The main problem with America is that the little people don't tremble in front of fearsome idols." Brooks's column was about how recent monuments--the… More »
What does the belief divide mean for civil discourse in the U.S.? More »
Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider has assembled a 24-slide show to illustrate what President Obama meant when he infamously said the private sector is "doing fine." Below are the three key graphs. They don't change the fact that, obviously, the private sector has a ways to go before its recovery is complete. But they're powerful enough to make me wonder: What if Obama, rather than just try to walk back his unfortunate choice of words, trotted out some visual aids… More »
British journalist Alex Thomson says the death of journalists would have been bad publicity for Damascus. More »
The eminent Financial Times analyst Martin Wolf is getting a lot of attention for a scary column he just published. More »
I used to think Romney's klutziness was overstated. Then BuzzFeed dug up this clip. More »
