A new neuroimaging study offers a first look at what happens in the brain when we try to stop thinking about one thing in order to make room for new ideas. The findings offer clues on how to be more productive when studying and working. They could also lead to new therapies for trauma and anxiety disorders.

Do you like your job? Maybe you do, but I think you should reevaluate. At the very least, I think you should be uncomfortable with the fact that you live in a system that compels you to have a job, particularly if that job is neither necessary for your own well-being nor the well-being of others.

A 70-year-old Taco Bell employee was surprised with the tip of a lifetime after his community came together to thank him. For the past 20 years, Joe Deciccio has worked the drive-thru window at a South Daytona store -- handing out smiles and friendly greetings along with food orders.

Working time reduction has always been used as a way of distributing available work and reducing unemployment. In our era of crisis, we need to fight for a four-day week.

Baby names go in and out of style, but have you ever wondered why we prefer certain names over others? Believe it or not, the explanation may lie in part with the way the keys are arranged on our comp...

When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had climbed above one million, unemployment claims had topped 30 million and the United Nations had warned that the planet was facing “multiple famines of biblical proportions.” George Floyd was still alive, and the protests spurred by his killing had not yet swept the nation, but a different kind of protest, led by white men armed with heavy weaponry, had taken over the Michigan State Legislature building.

In an age of democracy via social media, platforms are struggling to combat visual mis/disinformation such as 'spliced' images and deepfakes. Digital media literacy has never been so important.

We've discussed in the past Yochai Benkler's excellent book "Network Propaganda," (and had Benkler on our podcast) showing (with a ton of data) how the inclination many have to immediately blame social media for the spread of...

Amid thousands of racial justice protests nationwide since George Floyd's death, over a hundred drivers have plowed into crowds marching in roadways. Those included 8 cops. Prosecutors determined that 43 of the incidents were malicious, and have charged 39 drivers.

Find out why Lewis Hamilton is on this year’s list

We, as adults, have not given children the tools to grow up healthy in our society.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine called for the abolishment of seasonal time changes last week

We all have been there. Cheating in a test, cheating in a UNO match, and whatnot. But while those innocent instances of cheating usually reflected our innocence, as we grew up, the word cheating took on a much more severe form. It was no more about asking someone an answer to a question in our exam. Instead, it became more about breaking someone’s heart or betraying someone’s trust.

Following his March visit to the Greater Philadelphia Boat Show, Gary Kleinschmidt decided, with a mixture of guilt and enthusiasm, that it might be the right time to replace his 22-foot bow rider with a slightly larger boat. Surely, he thought, in the midst of all the unemployment and financial uncertainty unleashed by COVID-19, boat owners and dealers would be desperate to make a deal.

In Ask Culture it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes.

Dr. Joshua Bell is a self-described people-person. It’s why he transitioned from archaeology to cultural anthropology when he realized he was more interested in the people around him than the objects he was excavating. So it’s no surprise that while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bell misses daily interactions with his colleagues at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Companies and programmers are reexamining how technical terms are used amid Black Lives Matter protests. But some worry the changes are empty symbolism.

There's a slightly bizarre Letter on Justice and Open Debate that Harper's Magazine is publishing, signed by a long list of famous people (many of whom I respect, and plenty of whom I think are terribly entitled wannabe...

The fight to liberate humanity from oppression, exploitation, butchery and madness is really a fight to expand consciousness.

Update: An interesting discussion around this started in hacker news