As Americans embraced the future after World War II, they entertained themselves with cinematic visions of mean streets and sordid pasts. The tale of film noir’s rise and fall has a few twists of its own.
William James’s provocative answer to the problem of maintaining religious belief in the modern age remains perhaps America’s most significant contribution to philosophy and a source of inspiration for contemporary thinkers.
For the first time in history, a majority of the world’s population now lives in cities. In the developing world, the names of vast new megacities—Dhaka, Lagos, Calcutta, Jakarta—are synonymous with human misery. But São Paulo is seeking to show that a megacity can work.
Women now hold half of all management jobs in America. Business books and magazines tout their superior leadership style. What’s really changing in the country’s corner offices?
Why do we flock to the beach? For some fun, a break from the heat, an escape from familiar routine. But “it’s always ourselves we find in the sea,” E. E. Cummings observed.
Sprawl-bashing only obscures what's really going on in the American landscape—and what can be done to improve the quality of life.
Leonhard Euler is seldom remembered as one of the Enlightenment greats, but he should be. His discoveries changed the course of mathematics forever, and 300 years after his birth his ideas continue to resonate in classrooms and laboratories.
A small Kenyan village is the laboratory for celebrity economist Jeffrey Sachs’s ambitious scheme to lift Africa out of poverty. Can big money buy the continent’s poorest people a better future?
The next big debate in the global warming arena is going to be about climate engineering. But efforts to manipulate the climate and weather have a long history of exaggerated claims and beliefs, and a dangerous tendency to become militarized. Even if they succeed, who will control the global thermostat?