It's mighty easy to feel like you don't have time to read — especially quality literature. Life is hectic, jobs are busy and it's much easier to scroll through a photo feed than it is to sink your brain into some juicy reading matter. But with these incredibly short and incredibly beautiful stories, all you need is a few minutes (a lunch break, say) to read great work from the best writers around. These stories are poignant revelations about...

For the past seven years, I’ve polled my students at the University of Prince Edward Island on two questions. First: If you were told today that a university education was no longer a requirement for high-quality employment, would you quit? Second: If you decided to stay, would you then switch programs? Positive responses to both questions run consistently in the 50 percent range. That means at least half of my humanities students...

I am an anthropologist. Anthropologists, as a group, study the diversity of human cultures to understand our commonalities and differences, and to use the knowledge of what is common to us all to help us bridge our differences. My research aims to help reduce violence between peoples, by first trying to understand thoughts and behaviors as different from my own as any I can imagine: such as suicide actions that kill masses of people innocent of direct harm to others.

America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It's one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, and presidential candidates in other nations don't cook bacon with guns. But America's relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms.

Stephen Hawking, Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan (via satellite) discuss the Big Bang theory, God, our existence as well as the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

And what they can teach us about starting small.

Hitting peak oil will come faster than any of us think. But don’t blame dwindling supply - it’s all about disappearing demand.

"People are leading secretly kind lives all the time but without a language in which to express this, or cultural support for it." We’ve come to see the emotional porousness that kindness requires as a dangerous crack in the armor of the independent self, an exploitable outward vulnerability — too high a cost to pay for the warm inward balm of the benevolence for which we long in the deepest parts of ourselves.