the cubit

A new Star Wars film premieres this week, accompanied by the kind of social ferment usually reserved for presidential elections—or in the case of this year, papal visits. Beyond George Lucas’ classic…

An illustrated guide.

Are kids from more religious families more or less altruistic than their peers from less-religious families? That’s what a high-profile new study from University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety…

If Hollywood is any indicator, one of the nation’s great romantic fantasies is to fall in love in the presence of death, a desire that animates two high-grossing genres. Let’s call the first kill-and…

Archaeologists say that the pyramids were used to store dead pharaohs. Ben Carson thinks that the pyramids were used to store grain. Carson is wrong. But to simply point out that he’s wrong is to miss…

Social media has made possible a new global distribution of cognitive ephemera. We are tweeting 6,000 times per second—and most of it is garbage. And while social media has facilitated powerful forms…

Yes, there are bad questions.

A review of Vanessa Ogle’s “Global Transformation of Time”

Presidential candidates currently fall into two camps. In the first, you have about 20 Republican and Democratic front-runners who have received political endorsements or significant national…

When you get down to it, neuroscience is just brains studying brains. One upshot of this reflexivity is a funny kind of loop: studying the brain tells you about being a self; being a self offers up…