Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don't have enough common ground for that to even be possible? An alien species is bound to be biologically very different, and their language will be shaped by their home environment, broader culture, and even how they perceive the universe. They might not even share the same math and physics.
Why did "protesters" storm the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021? Because they believed something demonstrably false: that the election had been "stolen." Why did a majority of Americans vote for the would-be dictator who promoted this lie three years later? At least in part, again, because many of them believed obviously false things: e.g., that the economy was worse than it was; that crime was more widespread, trans athletes more numerous, and migrants more violent.
The Akan concept of Sankofa is represented by a bird looking backward while moving forward. The message is "Go back and get it." You must retrieve wisdom from the past to move into the future. Forgetting where you came from doesn't liberate you; it orphans you. I encourage you to make Sankofa a prime meditation, Aries. The shape of your becoming must include the shape of your origin.
I grew up in a very religious, Christian family where Sunday's activities were predetermined and strictly enforced. Like many of my generation, come Sunday, our parents faithfully saw that we were dressed in our best attire and dutifully marched to church like preprogrammed automatons. With unblinking obedience, we reenacted this liturgy-week after week, year after unrelenting year-seemingly ad infinitum. Growing into adolescence, however, my mind began to fill with questions-many of them-but one upstaged the rest: "What was the purpose of our never ending churchgoing?"
I first became interested in silence over 15 years ago when an overdose of New York City noise got me wondering if and how I could find refuge in its opposite, in absolute quiet-something that was not merely a reduction in or lack of noise, but a vibrant counterpoint to the sounds which we assume define and shape our lives.
I saw the post on social that presented an observation supported by research that the people who lived the longest were the people with no purpose - people with "life purpose" died of stress-related illnesses in their 60s and 70s. This all started with an observation by an 87-year-old Okinawan fisherman who noted that the aimless souls he saw lived to 100 because they just fished, gardened, and gossiped; they didn't want anything. Didn't chase legacy. Didn't care about making a mark. Just drifted.
If not for Jane Jacobs, Susan Spehar might still be living in a big lonely house in the suburbs. Spehar and her husband had raised their kids in Darien, Connecticut, in a place with a pool and a yard and rooms that emptied as their kids left for college. After her husband's death and in search of noise and friendship, she found a rental in Greenwich Village.
You notice an ant struggling in a puddle of water. Their legs thrash as they fight to stay afloat. You could walk past, or you could take a moment to tip a leaf or a twig into the puddle, giving them a chance to climb out. The choice may feel trivial. And yet this small encounter, which resembles the 'drowning child' case from Peter Singer's essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' (1972), raises big questions.
Growing up in the Wild West of rapid technological development and expansion, most of my technological skills are self-taught. As I taught my first university course this past summer, I was faced with a room full of students who also seemed to have suffered this challenge. For teachers of all ages, the instinctual reaction is to simply avoid dealing with students and technology.
"It's important to look at many issues that are related to the teachings of the church." "Someone who says I'm against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life," he said. "And someone who says I'm against abortion but I'm in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don't know if that's pro-life."
A client came to see me after what she described as "three hours of hell." Her sister had left a voicemail that sounded "off"-the tone was different somehow, clipped maybe, or strained. My client's mind immediately jumped to the worst: someone in the family must have died. She spent the rest of her afternoon constructing elaborate scenarios, planning what she'd say at the funeral, worrying about how her elderly mother would cope.
In a far away land, the following facts are true and known to everyone: 1) A person who ingests a poison will die within the hour UNLESS that person ingests a stronger poison, which acts as an antidote and restores complete health. 2) Smith and Jones are the only manufacturers of poison. 3) Each makes several types of poison. 4) All poisons have different strengths. 5) Smith and Jones do not have access to each other's poisons.
I couldn't draw much else with the mouse, nothing more complicated than a lopsided house and a tree, so I would ask him, knowing full well he wasn't the artist in the family, to draw something for me; that day I asked for a dog. He tried his best, but what came up on the canvas was a misshapen thing - a kind of pig-dog hybrid that was so bad it had us laughing for a good while.
There is a deep and abiding ethical impulse under the political commitments that Marxism is associated with: socialism, communism and the fight against capitalism . When you ask people who are swimming in one of those seas what they're up to and why, they give what sounds to me-as an analytically trained moral philosopher-like moral explanations: they think there's something wrong with capitalism, something inappropriate about the way the system treats people. Yet, Marxists have often shied away from explicitly ethical thinking about capitalism.
Indeed, our most painful and vivid memories are often of experiences in which we were humiliated by or in front of others. Embarrassment can lead to shame and self-loathing. It can diminish our confidence, shake us from our sense of certainty, and cause the kind of repression that expresses itself in all types of neuroses. When we feel embarrassed, we want to avoid others and conceal that of which we are ashamed.
As we entered the AI micro age, which is where we are now, I asked a simple question: If we have access to all the information in the world at our fingertips, what will be the most important skill moving forward? It's going to be asking the right questions, like "Should I do this?" The option will be there to do just about anything, which raises questions about ethics, philosophy, and problem-solving. All of that happens to be the bedrock humanities curriculum.
Physicist Wolfgang Pauli dismissed a muddled theory with this single, scathing line: "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong." It sounds pedantic, but Pauli's point is an important one. Some claims are wrong not because they contradict evidence, but because they can't be tested at all. And that distinction is just as relevant when debating on social media today as it was when applied in the field of 20th-century physics.
The original idea was to run an actual D&D campaign over the course of the semester, with students encountering structured philosophical problems along the way-an in-game trolley problem, a famous sorcerer fatally entwined with the body of an innocent townsperson, and so on. I loved the immersive potential of that approach because it seemed like a way to give students a sense of having a personal stake in the matter, even while considering the rather fanciful conditions that arise in philosophical thought experiments.
However, the term 'Anthropocene' has become deeply ingrained in the public imagination and will not be simply erased. And it still has currency, but it needs to be broken loose from entrenched debates that carry unnecessary baggage. The Anthropocene is a prism through which we can examine the multifaceted history of human activities on this planet, and the spectrum of our potential futures.
Some idealists set out to build a new community from scratch. They saw themselves as unusually clear-headed and logical - people determined to build a society based on reason rather than on the accidents of tradition. If there was a better way to do something, they wanted to find it. At first, the experiment went smoothly. They shared work, rotated responsibilities, and debated policy late into the night.
Although the saltmarsh sparrow ( Ammospiza caudacuta) is considered endangered internationally, it's not legally recognised as such in the United States. Because these birds live only in the tidal salt marshes of the US Atlantic coast, this lack of legal recognition limits the support and protection available for their conservation.
Our Greek forebears, as early as Hippocrates, coined the term "kρίσις" to describe a "turning point"; kρίσις, a word related to the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, is etymologically connected to practices like "sieving," "discriminating" and "judging." In fact, the most widely mentioned skill we humanists offer our students, critical thinking, originates from the same practice of deliberate "sieving." Thus, when we call ourselves critics and write critical theory, we admit that crisis might just be our natural habitat.
Academic philosophy, it goes without saying, is increasingly seen as a venerable yet useless relic-a field of human inquiry relevant only at a bygone time, when science (as we know it today) did not yet exist. The scientific, techno-optimist mindset dominant in many circles today-with its emphasis on empirical testability and measurable results-is increasingly seen as the most effective, and efficient, method to address the concerns that have traditionally fallen under the purview of academic philosophy.
Conversion therapy is the discredited and harmful practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity. The therapist in the case (Kaley Chiles) argues that this law is an unconstitutional restriction on her speech: psychotherapy is, on her view, a kind of speech, and thus the state law violates her First Amendment rights. The state responds that psychotherapy is a medical procedure,
My footsteps echo across the floors of a gallery that seems nearly empty of people or art. Yet as I wander the gallery, I am mirrored by swarms of people that seem to flurry across the walls. From behind the glass of orderly, and often rather small, black and white photos, jubilant masses rush towards me arms raised, sometimes alongside grim-faced placard-carrying companions, while in others children play amidst rubble, friends embrace, and couples kiss.
The Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought was created to foster dialogue and interaction between scholars and students working on Chinese thought across different disciplines and through a variety of approaches. We invite submissions on any aspect of Chinese thought, as well as comparative work that engages Chinese perspectives.The 2026 conference will take place in person at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on April 3-4, 2026.
We collapse uncertainty into a line of meaning. A physician reads symptoms and decides. A parent interprets a child's silence. A writer deletes a hundred sentences to find one that feels true. The key point: Collapse is the work of judgment. It's costly and often can hurt. It means letting go of what could be and accepting the risk of being wrong.
The answer requires what I call wisdom of temporal perspectives in our decision-making. The wisdom of temporal perspectives involves the temporal appraisal of the current situation, where we take into consideration past factors that give rise to the situation and future consequences that may transpire when solving problems and making decisions. It is a form of transformational wisdom that is particularly important in a complex world of challenges today.
What's the big idea? There is no such thing as a calculator for life's decisions. Try as we might to quantify, count, and calculate in search of the "right" choice, that is simply not how wise decision-making happens. Qualitative judgment and consideration of preferences and values are required when identifying the best option before us. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite-read by Barry-below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
Dratch, who wore an all-navy outfit with a small bird-pendant necklace, was exploring Stick Stone & Bone, a West Village boutique that hawks woo-woo wares: gems, jewelry, incense. Nose-ringed clientele browsed quietly; jazzy piano twinkled softly from above. The shop had been recommended by Amy Poehler, Dratch's close friend and podcast guest. On the show, Dratch and her co-host, Irene Bremis, a comedian and Dratch's high-school pal, are regaled by familiar faces' woo-woo tales: Tina Fey's spooky Jersey vacation town, Will Forte's Ouija high jinks, Gloria Steinem on the intuition of the oppressed. Dratch said that Poehler is, generally, "the ultimate skeptic" of woo-woo-ness.
Forgiveness is often offered as a powerful solution, as an agent to not only help you heal from painful events but also allow you to move forward. The general idea is that holding onto anger can make you bitter and hold you back from healing from harm that someone has done to you. But the problem is that there are several serious complications when we try to use forgiveness as a solution.
