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Just as the Industrial Revolution spurred the creation of powerful and destructive machines like airplanes and tanks that diminished the role of individual soldiers, artificial intelligence technology is enabling the Pentagon to reorder the places of man and machine on the battlefield the same way it is transforming ordinary life with computers that can see, hear and speak and cars that can drive themselves.

For almost all her life, Verda Byrd has lived as a black women. She was raised by black parents, married a black man, attended black churches, and even frequented black hair salons. But two years ago, she learned from her adoption papers that she was actually white.  Verda was legally born Jeanette Beagle, daughter to a poor white woman named Daisy Beagle, who struggled to raise several kids in the 1940's.  She was put into a children's home after her biological mother was injured in an accident. A few years later, Jeanette was adopted by a black couple  — and she became Verda.  Although her adopted parents told Verda she wasn't biologically theirs, they never told her that she was white. The discovery prompted Verda to reunite with her biological sisters. Through the reconnection, she learned that her perspective of race was far different from theirs. 

Homo Economicus is a fundamentally selfish man. But what if he’s been vastly overhyped?

policymakers have over-learned Adam Smith’s lesson that people achieve collective good when they pursue private interest. Smith noted that pursuit of self interest often produces societal benefit. But Smith hedged his bets. Bowles charges that economists, jurists, and policymakers often don’t hedge theirs, and they have come to rely excessively on incentives based on the proposition that people’s behavior is entirely self-interested and amoral.

So this was the real test. Would native-speaker Swedes, seven years after getting a new pronoun plugged into their language, be more likely to assume this androgynous cartoon was a man? A woman? Either, or neither? Now that they had a word for it, a nonbinary option, would they think to use it?

One of Britain’s most respected Tudor historians has expressed concern that prospective students imagine Hilary Mantel’s novels are fact. John Guy told the Hay literary festival in Wales that Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels needed to be enjoyed for what they were: fiction. Mantel’s two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, have been a literary phenomenon, both winning the Man Booker prize and being adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company. But they are novels, said Guy, despite what some applicants he interviews to study history at Cambridge seem to think.