Glitter is notorious for getting everywhere – touch one sparkly Christmas card and you’ll be finding flecks of the stuff in your food, hair and carpet for months. It’s so obnoxious some people even slather a mixture of it and Vaseline on political yard signs to punish thieves. But the real issue with glitter isn’t that it’s annoying – it’s that it truly does get everywhere: not just in your home, but also into the furthest-flung corners of the Earth.

In recent years prominent pundits including Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson and Bill Gates have invoked the progress in global life expectancies to defend capitalism against a growing tide of critics. Certainly there’s a lot to celebrate on this front. After all, average human life expectancy has improved a great deal.

The US is attempting to imprison one of its critics, Julian Assange, by claiming a global right to prosecute any journalist in the world. If that prosecution succeeds, it would be a severe blow not just to press freedom, but to our very right to oppose imperialism and empire.

Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism. What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience...

If you’ve ever been around someone who is dying, it may have struck you how strong a person’s lifeforce really is. When my dad was gravely ill, an invisible point of no return was gradually crossed, then suddenly death was in plain sight. We stood back helplessly, knowing that nothing more could be done, that something vital had slipped away. All we could do is watch as life extinguished itself in agonising fits and starts.

It was only in the mid-20th century, in the wake of the shattering impact of World Wars and when capitalism and communism were competing for global dominance, that we began to measure the success of an economy in terms of gross national product, or GDP.

We face a growing array of problems that involve technology directly or indirectly. To name just a few: nuclear weapons, climate change induced by fossil fuels, the possibility that AI will get out of control, the effect of automation on employment, using bots and targeted fake news to influence elections, deepfake software, data and privacy concerns in general and, in particular, the capacity of facial-recognition software to create a surveillance state (like China).

Rather than confront the reality of child abuse, Trump fans have dreamed up an elaborate fiction to justify their support for a morally indefensible president. In recent weeks the groups have moved offline and into the real world, using their Facebook pages to organize in-person rallies outside tourist attractions like the Big Red Wagon in Spokane, Washington, and the state capitol building in Salem, Oregon. The believers hold signs that say things like “#SavetheChildren” and “Stop Child Trafficking.” They’re often accompanied by their children, wearing T-shirts and onesies that read “I am not for sale.”

And we are back to this debate. I know this is a touchy subject, but I really wanted to address it. Two days ago I listened to a podcast about veganism. It was all about how vegans should stick to the diet, and if once in a while they ate oysters or tuna they had it all wrong and had to ethical commitment.

The loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg tonight is a stunning blow to progressives across the country and it throws yet another wrench into the upcoming election. You can bet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will nominate a replacement ASAP (the obvious hypocrisy be damned) and Donald Trump will do everything he can to rush through the youngest right-wing female judge he can find in the next few weeks.

Within the next few days, we will pass a grisly benchmark: more than 200,000 Americans dead from the coronavirus. Public health experts predict that number may rise to 400,000 by the end of the year. If the Trump administration pursues a “herd immunity” strategy, where the disease is allowed to spread unchecked throughout the country, then millions of people may die.

Think spending time with your kids and spouse is the key to your happiness? You may actually be happier getting together with your friends, said SMU psychology professor Nathan Hudson. Hudson's research finds that people report higher levels of well-being while hanging with their friends than they do with their romantic partner or children. In fact, being around romantic partners predicted the least amount of happiness among these three groups, reveals a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV.

This should be a wake-up call: New data suggest that the United States is one of just a few countries worldwide that is slipping backward. The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace

Philosophy can help us live more meaningful lives and build better societies. We just need a framework of philosophy that fits our modern-day problems.

Say what you want about the panel gaps and the tweets, but everyone who's come at this king so far has missed. My opinion of Tesla in recent years has been one hell of a roller-coaster ride. At first, I admired the company's fast, innovative electric cars; then I grew to hate CEO Elon Musk's constant Twitter shenanigans and nuclear takes on journalists and the media.

As climate change continues to increase the frequency and intensity of storms, and as sea level rise and coastal erosion push storm damage further inland, millions of additional American properties are at risk for catastrophic damage each year. A major report released in June shows that federal flood maps underestimate the number of homes and businesses at risk of flooding by a stunning 67%

Malaysia is a country that I know well, and whose political system I have studied closely for 15 years. It is also not a democracy. Malaysia has a multiparty parliamentary system of government, but the same coalition of parties has been in power for six decades, and has never lost a general election.

Does imposing the death penalty lower rates of violent crime? What economic policies will lead to broad prosperity? Which medical treatments should we allow and encourage to treat novel diseases? These questions have a few things in common. They bear important consequences for us all, and so policymakers and the public would like to know the answers – if good answers even exist.