North Korea canceled high-level talks with South Korea scheduled for later this week, apparently because the South’s choice of negotiator was for some reason unacceptable. “We consider the North Korean decision very regrettable,” said a South Korean government spokesman. They were to have been the highest-level talks in six years.Yesterday we noted that North Korea’s […]

Today’s Telegraph has an excerpt from a recent speech given in London by David Petraeus, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and former director of the CIA. It is a sober and informative reflection on the Global War on Terror and what General Petraeus believes Britain and America’s duties are going forward. As […]

The euro crisis is so large, and its real world effects so tragic, that people often forget that the monetary mess is only one of many areas in which the EU isn’t working. Here’s a big one: Europe doesn’t have a security strategy and doesn’t want to talk about it. Judy Dempsey, editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe […]

Black men are more eager for long-term relationships (in most cases, this means marriage) than black women, according to a new study released jointly by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health. The results, which surprised the researchers, indicated that 43 percent of black men were inclined to say they wanted […]

Bee Wilson’s history of the fork—and other kitchen appurtenances—shows us that we are how we eat as well as what we eat. Culinary tools have reflected cultural dispositions in surprising ways, and continue to do so to this very day.

Discerning the origins and nature of consciousness is the neuro- science challenge. Does “mind” reduce to “brain”, or not? If not, can information rolling recursively back on itself explain it?

Noble intentions and some benign outcomes notwithstanding, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act has proved to be a very expensive legal monstrosity with dubious constitutional credentials.

Visiting Cuba is like taking a journey in a time machine. The streets are filled with 1950s-era cars. The buildings are vintage art deco (albeit often with crumbling facades). Sounds of Caribbean and African rhythms, often produced by elderly musicians, fill the air. Cuba, however, far from stuck in a time-warp, is in fact a […]

Online classrooms may be the way of the future, but they aren’t very effective without a little old-fashioned face-to-face learning. That’s the finding of a new study from the journal Research & Practice in Assessment, which has conducted one of the first comprenesive studies of the functioning of MOOCs. The study combed through student data from MIT’s “Circuits […]

French President Francois Hollande is dealing with a pension system €14 billion in debt and a political base that is unwilling to do what it takes to stop the bleeding. Keen to avoid the union-mobilized protests that brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets when Nicolas Sarkozy raised the retirement age from 60 […]