Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness “is the most mysterious aspect of our lives”; philosophers “have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.”

She is between the ages of 25–34. Or she’s under 32. She is a millen­nial. She’s inferred married. But she uses her phone like a single lady. She completed high school. She votes, but she’s not regis­tered in a party. She lives in the home she has owned for four­teen years. Or she lives away from her home­town. She’s an Expat (US). She returned from a trip two weeks ago. She drives a Honda ACCORD, has owned a truck, and intends to purchase a vehicle soon. She might like RVs...

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, the history major has lost significant market share in academia, declining from 2.2% of all undergraduate degrees to 1.7%. The graduating class of 2014, the most recent for which there are national data, included 9% fewer history majors than the previous year’s cohort, compounding a 2.8% decrease the year before that. The drop is most pronounced at large research universities and prestigious liberal arts colleges.

When it comes to civil liberties, Obama has made grievous mistakes. To salvage his reputation, he should exonerate the two greatest whistleblowers of our age. As he wraps up his presidency, it’s time for Barack Obama to seriously consider pardoning whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Last week, Manning marked her six-year anniversary of being behind bars. She’s now served more time than anyone who has leaked information to a reporter in history – and still has almost three decades to go on her sentence.

An insider's look at what he gave up to create a classic game. I don’t think I could come up with a more perfect description of how my time working on Fable felt than those words penned by Dickens nearly 160 years ago. The recent closure of Lionhead Studios made this an ideal time to share some of those stories.

In the wake of the resignation of Tony Faddell, the founder of smart thermostat maker Nest, the future is looking cloudy not only for the smart thermostat maker, but the broader smart home business as well. Nest, after all, was supposed to be the trailblazer that led us to the smart home revolution. When Google put down $3.2 billion to buy it in 2014, it appeared to make sense -- Google was already running much of our online lives, and this would give the company a way to run our offline lives as well.

I’ve written some in the past about how the predominant suburban design in the US is among the worst features of life here—viewed from the perspective of a European immigrant like me, at any rate. Far from posing a mere logistical or aesthetic problem, it shapes–or perhaps more accurately, it circumscribes–our experience of life and our social relationships in insidious ways. The destruction of the pedestrian public realm is not merely an economic or ecological absurdity; it has real deleterious effects.

The beginning of my end with Twitter came with both a frowny face emoticon from Ari Isaacman Bevacqua, one of The Times’s audience development experts, and a boilerplate email from Twitter: “We reviewed the account and content reported and are unable to take action given that we could not determine a clear violation of the Twitter Rules surrounding abusive behavior.” For weeks, I had been barraged on Twitter by rank anti-Semitic comments, Nazi iconography of hooknosed Jews stabbing lovely Christians in the back, the gates of Auschwitz, and trails of dollar bills leading to ovens.

Gawker is filing for bankruptcy. Peter Thiel, who is a Facebook board member and Donald Trump delegate, secretly sued Gawker in a proxy lawsuit and, even though the case is unresolved, it was enough to bleed and bankrupt the company. And so much of the Silicon Valley establishment cheered Thiel on.

Festival-goers are marking the start of summer solstice by gathering as communities to celebrate over barbecued meat. This could be a scene from anywhere in the world, but the one making headlines is from Yulin, China – because the animals on the barbecue will be dogs. The annual summer festival in Yulin has been widely criticized, mostly by Westerners who aren’t used to thinking of dogs as food. Images and footage of filthy dogs crowded into cages and being brutally slaughtered...

Jon O. Newman is a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The acquittal Thursday of another Baltimore police officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray, like the acquittal 25 years ago of the Los Angeles officers who beat Rodney King, reveals the inadequacy of the criminal-law remedy. Suing the police for money under a strengthened federal civil rights law would be a better response to police misconduct.

Tony Blair is damned. We have seen establishment whitewashes in the past: from Bloody Sunday to Hillsborough, officialdom has repeatedly conspired to smother truth in the interests of the powerful. But not this time. The Chilcot inquiry was becoming a satirical byword for taking farcically long to execute a task; but Sir John will surely go down in history for delivering the most comprehensively devastating verdict on any modern prime minister.

This week has been a catastrophe for Blackness. Two men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, were killed by police officers within 24 hours of each other. Neither had committed a crime that was punishable by death nor did they put any officers lives at risk. It’s inexcusable, unjustifiable, and is perpetuated by a system that disproportionately targets Black Men. Then in the same week, police officers in Dallas were killed during an otherwise peaceful protest about those killings.

It's Feeling the News with Coop and Tony Destructo.

Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter – a prominent left of center legal scholar – has an excellent column highlighting an important lesson of the recent tragic death of Eric Garner at the hands of a New York City police officer. Unlike the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri, where there was conflicting witness testimony, this killing was pretty obviously indefensible, and has been condemned by observers across the political spectrum. But, as Carter emphasizes, incidents like this are also a predictable consequence of the overextension of the regulatory state...

Friends: I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.” Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.

What’s the most common age of sex-offenders? It’s not a trick question, but unless you follow this stuff closely you’ll almost certainly answer wrong. In fact, most people are shocked to learn that the most common age of people charged with a sex offense isn’t a creepy 39, or 51. It’s 14. That’s right. As the US Bureau of Justice reports: “The single age with the greatest number of offenders from the perspective of law enforcement was age 14.”

There is nothing more sacred to the maintenance of democracy than a free press. Access to comprehensive, accurate and quality information is essential to the manifestation of Socratic citizenship - the society characterized by a civically engaged, well-informed and socially invested populace. Thus, to the degree that access to quality information is willfully or unintentionally obstructed, democracy itself is degraded.

All summer, kids have been hanging out in front of the Morris Park Library in the Bronx, before opening hours and after closing. They bring their computers to pick up the Wi-Fi signal that is leaking out of the building, because they can’t afford internet access at home. They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework.

Good news: two new comedies hit British cinemas this week. Bad news: they’re both bleak as hell. Especially unexpected in this respect is Nine Lives. It sounded so fluffy: Kevin Spacey’s millionaire executive learns to be a better dad after he’s trapped in the body of a cat by Christopher Walken’s magical pet shop owner. But aside from the odd moment of litter-tray high jinks, this is a family film fixated on divorce, alcoholism, suicide, cyber-bullying, “do not resuscitate” directives and a hostile corporate takeover.