What is the individual’s right to privacy and how much should be sacrificed in the name of “security?” Edward Snowden, Noam Chomsky, and Glenn Greenwald discuss these and other questions.

The idea of empathy for all ignores the limits of human psychology. By Adam Waytz.

From Yemen to Somalia, the White House has gone back to bombing men it can’t confirm are militants — potentially leaving innocents trapped in the crossfire. By Dan de Luce and Paul Mcleary.

With control of the Senate at stake, blue-state Republican incumbents hope the issue will let them reprise Scott Brown’s 2010 win in Massachusetts. By Charlie Savage.

“The philosophical problems that can be solved from the armchair have already been solved.” By Olivia Goldhill.

In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments -- experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard? A look inside the files. By Alston Chase. (June ’00)

Imagine living in a cell that’s smaller than a parking space — with a homicidal roommate. By Christie Thompson and Joe Shapiro.

A medical revolution aims to stave off age-related disease and extend our lives — but what will it mean for society? By Brooke Borel.

On the architectural horror of Albert Speer. By Michael J. Lewis.

Many sex workers think their work should be as legal as accounting. And American society is closer than ever to agreeing with them. By Mac McClelland.

Men like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz don’t have to bear the cost. By Eric Fair.

In the western, liberal tradition, freedom is king, and that includes the freedom to be unhappy. If someone wants to engage in self-harming acts such as drunkenness, for example, one cannot judge them negatively so long as they consent to it and do no harm to others. This type of thinking would have been alien to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the German philosopher, who is sometimes portrayed as a joyless moralist but was, in fact, deeply concerned with human happiness...

On Saturday, the US used drones to drop precision bombs on Somalia, reportedly killing about 150 al-Shabab militants who were said to be preparing for an imminent attack on American and African Union forces. Eye in the Sky, a remarkably timely and important new film about a fictional drone strike against al-Shabab, offers a hypothetical window into such decision-making. By David Cole.

Neurological evidence that people feel less responsible for actions when taking orders. By Annalee Newitz,

Is moral truth a priori and not a natural property of the universe? So says Dr. Russ Shafer-Landau (as articulated in Whatever Happened to Good and Evil in 2003; and Moral Realism: A Defence in 2005). Even though I’m sympathetic to his project, he’s just wrong. And not merely wrong, but too obviously wrong for this to still be a thing in 21st century philosophy. Here I’ll explain why I think that.

It is only recently that the claims of psychologists to moral expertise have come to be taken seriously. Contributing to their new aura of authority has been their association with neuroscience, with its claims to illuminate the distinct neural pathways taken by our thoughts and judgments. Neuroscience, it is claimed, has revealed that our brains operate with a dual system for moral decision-making. By Tamsin Shaw.

A gay-marriage opponent changes his mind. By Michael Coren. (July ’15)

Other parents might say they want their mediocre children to make the world a better place. But my girl is destined to do more than that, mostly for white people. By Kiese Laymon.

A Yale bioethicist says the United Nations won’t stop killer robots, but the United States could right now start setting a few rules limiting their development and use. By Patrick Tucker.

“Word choice is hard here. Should we say ‘raped’ automatically if a grown man has sex with a teenager? Does it matter at all if the 15-year-old, now much older, describes their encounter as one of the best nights of her life? What is our word for a ‘yes’ given on a plane that’s almost vertically unequal? Does contemporary morality dictate that we trust a young woman when she says she consented freely, or believe that she couldn’t have, no matter what she says?” By Jia Tolentino.