psychology
Why authoritarians love—and hate—an apology
One of the many things we can expect in the next four years is a lot of sputtering demands for apologies for the last four years.
Triumph of the feels
Our UK contributor looks at the American disaster with recently acquired humility.
Beyond nostalgia: Why America's next chapter demands forward thinking
Yearning to return to a golden age that never existed will not meet the challenges ahead.
Is the sun setting on solitary confinement?
If our system of punishment continues to revolve around deprivation, the future will always include some version of a dark hole in the ground.
For the Trump faithful, it comes down to plot armor
It's no surprise that Trump benefits from a feature you've seen on bad television.
The evolution of cuteness: Why kittens and puppies beat babies, paws down
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve long suspected I have a character flaw: I am far more charmed by kittens and puppies—in fact by any non-human baby animals—than baby humans. It’s a kind of intra-species treason, I suppose. For one thing, kits and pups are far more entertainingly interactive far earlier
Bleeding blue: How to serve, protect, and not kill
Reading Time: 6 minutes It seems we may be focusing on too many of the wrong things in the fraught aftermath of an enraged fatal beating by seven cops of an unarmed Black motorist last week after a traffic stop in Memphis, Tennessee. Potential solutions might be far less complicated and opaque than
What makes ‘skeptical’ kids grow up to be God-believing adults?
Reading Time: 8 minutes If kids are the savvy, skeptical creatures that Will Gervais proposes in his recent essay, why do endless hordes of them in each generation turn into conservative American adults who uncritically worship invisible gods with zero objective verification? And what makes these sa
Hearing loss, failing eyesight, and the struggles we try to hide
Reading Time: 5 minutes Let’s talk about discrimination. Not the racial type: I’m talking about the ability of human hearing to discriminate, to distinguish the all-important but often whisper-subtle edges of what most people experience as the familiar sounds of vowels and consonants. For some of us