International law may be a good idea, but it has its limits.
Environmentalists are looking beyond international accords to achieve their goals.
Transhumanists believe that someday we‘ll be full-fledged adult posthumans, with physical and intellectual powers of which we can now only dream. But will progress really make perfect?
Cheap food, widely available, would seem to be the promise of new technologies, but it comes with a host of hidden dangers.
Farmers today face critical choices about how they will farm--and their decisions affect not only how much they grow but where they can sell their produce.
The food industry's aggressive marketers have made gorging a national pastime.
Will genetically engineered foods eliminate world hunger--or cause problems we can't even predict?
Americans like to think of themselves as a pragmatic people, with little use for professors and fancy ideas. Yet they also live and die for abstractions such as freedom and equality. That’s not just some inexplicable paradox but a key to understanding the American intellectual landscape.
In Hollywood war movies of the 1940s, American soldiers fought for a sense of national purpose. In subsequent decades, they fought mainly for the sake of their buddies. Now, when the mayhem in war films is more realistic than ever, Hollywood seems unwilling to give the violence a larger context.