In principle, to be cool means to remain calm even under stress. But this doesn’t explain why there is now a global culture of cool. What is cool, and why is it so cool to be cool? The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States … Read more

Aside from illustrating some of the glaring differences between jurisdictions when approaching copyright protection and infringement, the trial illustrates, perhaps more significantly, the problem of balancing an artist’s rights of authorship (as inherited by their estate) against the freedom of expression of museum curators and other creators; in this case, photographers. Link

In the range of his genius, Freeman Dyson is heir to Einstein—a visionary who has reshaped thinking in fields from math to astrophysics to medicine, and who has conceived nuclear-propelled spaceships designed to transport human colonists to distant planets. And yet on the matter of global warming he is, as an outspoken skeptic, dead wrong: … Read more

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA. […] Schizophrenia is usually diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 25, but the person who becomes schizophrenic is sometimes recalled … Read more