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The trio of researchers are young—as professors go—good-humored family men. They recalled that they were nervous as the publication time approached. The paper basically suggested that much of what social scientists thought they knew about fundamental aspects of human cognition was likely only true of one small slice of humanity. They were making such a broadside challenge to whole libraries of research that they steeled themselves to the possibility of becoming outcasts in their own fields.

Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.

Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”

As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it.

He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations.

HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced. Response to the paper, both published and otherwise, has been nearly universally positive, with more than a few of their colleagues suggesting that the work will spark fundamental changes. “I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences,” said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. “It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement.”

He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.

Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t go down very easily.

That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.

And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.

TPM spoke with activists working on both issues and they identified several reasons marijuana legalization may have a less bumpy road along the way to earning nationwide support.

“The argument for legalization has really been sort of couched in medical usage. You still have to sell marriage. Not everyone knows a gay person or a gay person who wants to marry their same-sex partner. Everyone knows someone who smokes weed,” the consultant said.

In theory, support for pot legalization could stall at the current 50/50 split. But one key trend, the same driving the seemingly inexorable rise of support for gay marriage, makes that outcome highly unlikely. Young people overwhelmingly support legalization. And diehard opposition is heavily concentrated among older voters.

“What I would really pinpoint as the source of this last four year nudge up where we jumped up 10 points is the economy,” Altieri said. “People always knew we shouldn’t be giving such harsh punishments to those arrested for marijuana offenses and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put them in jail. It became much more imperative when we had the financial crisis and then we’re seeing the debt ceiling.”

Washington and Colorado’s legalization law also set the stage for a pivotal moment where Attorney General Eric Holder will decide whether to intervene in those states and arrest those involved in the (still federally illegal) marijuana trade.

On this cape, early in the 15th century, well before Columbus sailed, Henry planned Europe's assault on the world. In the process, he laid the foundation of the modern world and modern Europe.

This is a passing phase, however. Humans will return to space to own it, discover unknown wealth and bring glory.

Certainly, European imperialism brought misery to the world. But the world was making itself miserable before, and has since: One group of people has always been stealing land from other groups in a constant flow of history. What culture did not live on land stolen from another culture, either annihilated or absorbed? Ours has always been a brutal world. And the Europe Henry founded did not merely oppress and exploit, although it surely did those things. It also left as its legacy something extraordinary: a world that knew itself and all of its parts.

Instead, there is caution and fear. You get the sense in Europe -- and here I think of conversations I had on previous trips in the last year or so -- of a fear that any decisive action will tear the place apart.

The European search for comfort and safety is not trivial, not after the horrors of the 20th century. The British and French have given up empires, Russia has given up communism, Germany and Italy have given up fascism and racism. The world is better off without these things. But what follows, what is left?

The Europeans are content to put all that behind them. Their great search for the holy grail is now reduced to finding a way to resume the comforts of the unexceptional. There is something to be said for the unexceptional life. But it cannot be all there is. 

Allowing six more countries to become observer states shows that the members of the Arctic Council -- even those initially skeptical of expansion, such as Canada and Russia -- see the expansion as an opportunity to give the Arctic Council greater relevance.

One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same.

And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable.

And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world.

the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.

The informal way of getting by doesn’t tide you over when you’re sick and it doesn’t let you raise kids and it doesn’t let you grow old. It’s not biologically real.

We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?

But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don’t have that you can’t really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn’t a broad distribution of wealth.

But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it’s a kind of capitalism that’s totally self-defeating because it’s so narrow. It’s a winner-take-all capitalism that’s not sustaining.

You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention.

I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there’s this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media.

And that’s good for a 20-year-old, but she’s at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life.

It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.

I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.

I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.

So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria.

Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.

Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that’s now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn’t actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.

Consider “parallel exclusion,”

Here’s a simple proposal: when members of a concentrated industry act in parallel, their conduct should be treated like that of a hypothetical monopoly.

The F.C.C. could have done something about this years ago; the fact that it took a member of the industry to call out more than a decade’s abuse of consumers amounts to a serious failure on the part of the F.C.C.

it’s important not to become fixated on form, but to attend to the realities that face consumers and citizens.

The licenses for Office 365 Home Premium and Office 2013 Home & Student prohibit using the software for commercial purposes.

An interesting implication of this graph: The filibuster has become more common even as it’s become easier to break.

Not surprisingly, China's coastal ports dwarf inland ports in terms of both overall throughput and throughput growth. But more telling is that of the major Yangtze ports for which the National Bureau of Statistics provides freight traffic data, only three (at Chongqing, Yueyang and Wuhu) showed significant growth in throughput between 2007 and 2011.

Rather, it is that the needs of the economy -- growth with stability, and energy security despite energy demands that far outstrip domestic resources -- are themselves inconsistent and contradictory.

So, all the bluster about Americans not connecting with Obama or his “radical” social agenda is just hot air. Most of the pundit commentary that fills up airtime in the 24 hour news cycle is, politically speaking, mostly inconsequential.

Now a new paper has come out in Nature, reporting a parallel monkey study conducted by the National Institute of Aging. The NIA study began around the same time as the Wisconsin study, with similar experimental conditions. But the Nature authors found no increase in lifespan; the calorically restricted animals lived no longer, statistically, than their well-fed cousins. Even stranger, the NIA control monkeys, the ones who ate a lot, actually lived just as long as the calorie-restricted Wisconsin primates. What gives?

It didn’t take him long to realize that the animals’ food was more important than anyone had thought. The NIA monkeys were fed a natural-ingredient diet, made from ground wheat, ground corn, and other whole foods; the Wisconsin animals ate a “purified” diet, a heavily refined type of food that allowed the researchers to control the nutritional content more precisely. Because the NIA monkeys were eating more natural ingredients, de Cabo realized, they were taking in more polyphenols, micronutrients, flavonoids, and other compounds that may have health-promoting effects.

In other words, it matters whether you eat at Whole Foods, like the suburban-Maryland NIA monkeys—or at the ballpark, like the Wisconsin monkeys. Guess which works out better in the end?

Nutritional Value: The the Annals of Internal Medicine summary concluded that organic foods have no substantial vitamin or mineral advantage (save phosphorous, which is in high abundance in human diets anyway) over foods that are conventionally grown.

Environmental Impact: One of the goals of organically grown and produced foods are to encourage environmentally friendly farming and growth practices, cycling of natural resources, and growing food without the need for harsh pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

Public Health and Antibiotics: The Atlantic also points out that because organic foods—epsecially organic meats—have to contain 95%-100% organic materials, synthetic additives and antibiotics cannot be added to the animal feed.

Pesticides and Chemical Additives: One point that the study also made was that organic foods are much less likely to contain pesticides (consuming organics reduces risk of consuming pesticides by 30%) although both conventional and organic foods were shown to have pesticide traces well below USDA limits.

Taste: Obviously, whether organic foods taste better is a matter of, well, taste. Many people swear by the difference in organic eggs, dairy, meats, and some produce. Others say that when blindfolded, those same people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between organic and conventional. There's incredibly little data on this topic, so we'll have to leave it up to you and your palate to decide.

Price: At most supermarkets, organic goods come at a premium price. Part of it is a matter of supply and demand, and part of it is that organic produce, meat, and dairy often require more money to grow than conventional goods.

Mass Effect has a simple message: human beings are delusional about their importance in the grand scheme of things.

Mass Effect starts with humanity in the galaxy where it should have been in the United Federation of Planets: unnoticed among the other minor species struggling to prove to the Council why they add anything of value to the civilization that is Citadel Space.

Mass Effect portrays our species from the perspective of the established species in the universe: we are fumbling neophytes with FTL drives.

Mass Effect's message is designed to open up narrative complexity by destabilizing the player's sense of confidence in his or her own skin. By undermining the value of being human, threatening and novel lifeforms become relatable, minority aliens become allies, and human intentions become questionable.

The flaw in every science fiction series is that they shy from the deep horror of the existence of intelligent life in infinite spacetime – save for two: the one that brought first brought it to our attention and the one that sees this horror as the framework for reality.

The flaw is a simple one: the assumption that life has meaning, that intelligent life has a purpose, and that humanity contributes anything to the universe.

Cosmicism is not merely the idea that there is no meaning in the universe. It's far worse. Instead, the argument is that there is meaning, but it is so far above and beyond human understanding that we can never attain meaningful existence.

Therein the triple layered question – What value does galactic civilization bring to the universe; What value does humanity bring to galactic civilization, and What value do I bring to humanity – forces the player to recontextualize his or her participation in the experiment of existence.

No, only one thing has changed. Generation X stopped being young.

In the ’50s, senators fretted that comic books would “offer courses in murder, mayhem, [and] robbery” for youth. In the ’80s, parents worried that Dungeons and Dragons would “pollute and destroy our chil­dren’s minds”—and that the Walkman would turn them into antisocial drones. This pattern is as old as the hills. As Chaucer noted in The Canterbury Tales, “Youth and elde are often at debaat.”