Education should not be defended on strict utilitarian grounds. Children should spend their school years learning all the things they will not need later in life.
To tech enthusiasts, the world is a problem waiting to be solved through progress. But what if many of us are quite content to live imperfectly?
Instead of locking nuclear waste away in deep repositories, we should entrust it to the care of future generations. Our responsibility must become their responsibility.
The debate over same-sex marriage shows that we have already abandoned a definition of love based in biology.
Many of us lack a basic understanding of scientific problems – with far-reaching political consequences.
Religious holidays have become cornerstones of the secular calendar even as their original meaning is ignored.
Fate and destiny have long been used to explain historical developments and personal biographies. But can they survive the 21st century?
Are we the drivers of technological innovation, or passengers on the digital train?
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Words are weapons. And they often tell us remarkably little about the underlying ideas.
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What's the difference between a vacuum cleaner salesman and a politician?
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Our ability to archive increasing amounts of data is threatening one of the fundamental aspects of human cultural development: our ability to forget.
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The Mayan calendar was based on the assumption that the history of a people is finite. Our Roman calendar is infinite - and it might outlive our civilization.
