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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

it quickly becomes clear that what “The Maniac” is really trying to get a lock on is our current age of digital-informational mastery and subjection

When von Neumann proclaims that, thanks to his computational advances, “all processes that are stable we shall predict” and “all processes that are unstable we shall control,” we’re being prompted to reflect on today’s ubiquitous predictive-slash-determinative algorithms.

When he publishes a paper about the feasibility of a self-reproducing machine — “you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being” — few contemporary readers will fail to home straight in on the fraught subject of A.I.

why some people get angry more intensely or more often than others. 

always some sort of event that happens right before someone gets angry that serves as the trigger

whether or not we get angry in response to a particular situation has to do with how we appraise or evaluate the situation.

we ought to ask why meditation is useful. So I polled a group of meditation researchers, teachers and practitioners on why they recommend it. I liked their answers, but none of them were unique to meditation. Every benefit of the practice can be gained through other activities.

it may reduce stress. Fine. But so does quality sleep and exercise

you can reduce stress simply by changing the way you think about it.

When the South Dakota state legislature passed HB 1217 in early March, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem tweeted that she was "excited" to sign it.That bill would have stopped transgender girls and women from playing on sports teams designated for girls and women.

These types of bills have been introduced in 25 states nationwide and have become a nationwide cause for social conservatives like Noem.

The ongoing fight in South Dakota is indicative not only of the way the issue of transgender girls in sports has become a nationwide phenomenon, but of the way that the NCAA looms over debates over transgender rights, and especially over the fight over transgender sports bans

I realized many of my friends—especially the white ones—have no idea what I’ve experienced/dealt with unless they were present (and aware) when it happened. There are two reasons for this: 1) because not only as a human being do I suppress the painful and uncomfortable in an effort to make it go away, I was also taught within my community (I was raised in the ’70s and ’80s—it’s shifted somewhat now) and by society at large NOT to make a fuss, speak out, or rock the boat. To just “deal with it,” lest more trouble follow (which, sadly, it often does); 2) fear of being questioned or dismissed with “Are you sure that’s what you heard?” or “Are you sure that’s what they meant?” and being angered and upset all over again by well-meaning-but-hurtful and essentially unsupportive responses.

the white privilege in this situation is being able to move into a “nice” neighborhood and be accepted not harassed, made to feel unwelcome, or prone to acts of vandalism and hostility.

if you’ve never had a defining moment in your childhood or your life where you realize your skin color alone makes other people hate you, you have white privilege.

After a string of deaths, some heart-stopping plunges in the stock market and an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve, there is reason to be concerned about the ultimate economic impact of the coronavirus in the United States.

Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than in China. That is because face-to-face service industries — the kind of businesses that go into a tailspin when fearful people withdraw from one another — tend to dominate economies in high-income countries more than they do in China.

If people stay home from school, stop traveling and don’t go to sporting events, the gym or the dentist, the economic consequence would be worse

Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.

More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.

Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”

For more than a decade, both parties in Washington have mostly looked the other way when mass shootings occur. And they have mostly ignored the 34 victims who are murdered with guns every single day.

prohibit the manufacture and sale of the military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips that have been used in too many mass shootings, including in Newtown. The previous ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. While President George W. Bush supported reinstating it, Congress never acted. The time has plainly come.

fix the broken background check system. Currently, nearly half of all gun sales in the U.S. are conducted without a background check. Criminals, the mentally ill, minors and domestic abusers are all prohibited from purchasing guns, but they all can do so as easily as attending a gun show or going online.

a steady push toward viewing on phones and tablets is shrinking the spirit of films. In the past, he said — citing “A Man for All Seasons,” “8 ½,” and “The Searchers” — there was a grandeur to films that delivered long-form storytelling on very large screens.

the prospect that a film will embed itself into the cultural and historical consciousness of the American public in the way of “Gone With the Wind” or the “Godfather” series seems greatly diminished in an era when content is consumed in thinner slices, and the films that play broadly often lack depth.

After six weeks in theaters “The Master,” a 70-millimeter character study much praised by critics, has been seen by about 1.9 million viewers. That is significantly smaller than the audience for a single hit episode of a cable show like “Mad Men” or “The Walking Dead.”

But I can't understand why you would support someone as hateful, sexist, racist and ignorant as Donald Trump.

It's not okay to marginalize an entire race of people, saying things like all the Mexicans are lazy, that they are all stealing our jobs and bringing drugs into our country.

We're all human. Some humans are really bad people. Some are really good. And it doesn't matter what color they are, it makes no difference whatsoever

To illustrate the near-impossibility of establishing veracity in photography he engaged in what might seem like a mad, hopeless enterprise: to see whether the cannonballs were initially on the road or placed there—posed for ideological impact. An investigation that involved him going halfway around the world to the Crimea to find the road and subsequently interviewing “shadow experts” on the time of day each photograph might have been shot. As one commenter wrote: “Don’t miss the excursus on the use of albatross eggs to provide the albumen for photo emulsions in early film developing. Or the meditation on Descartes’ Meditations. Or the succinct and devastating deconstruction of deconstructionists’ dim witted view of truth (just because we can’t necessarily know it, they rashly conclude it doesn’t exist). This leads to his critique of the correlative misreading of the film Rashomon [it’s not an ‘all points of view are equally valid’ manifesto] and his desire, expressed in a footnote, for a Rashomon about Rashomon.”

researchers have perfected a technique for growing miniature balls of cortical tissue—the key working tissue in the human brain—in a dish

As off-the-wall insane as this sounds, it isn’t just some mad science experiment. These tiny, 3D structures function much like the outer mantle, or cortex, of the brain of the person from which they were derived.

“While the technology is still maturing, there is great potential for using these assays to more accurately develop, test safety and effectiveness of new treatments before they are used in individuals with a mental illness,”

It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big social revolution that we live with

The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

Robert K. Logan’s “The Sixth Language,” begins with the claim that cognition is not a little processing program that takes place inside your head, Robby the Robot style. It is a constant flow of information, memory, plans, and physical movements, in which as much thinking goes on out there as in here. If television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche: everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single planetary brain. Contraptions don’t change consciousness; contraptions are part of consciousness.

“There are two people digging by the side of the road. Can we shoot them?”

In war, of course, there are many ways to kill. I did so by giving orders. I never fired my weapon in combat, but I ordered countless others to

My initial reaction was to ask the question to someone higher up the chain of command.

Ann Coulter penned a column explaining why soccer is un-American. First, it’s collectivist. (“Individual achievement is not a big factor…blame is dispersed.”) Second, it’s effeminate. (“It’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”) Third, it’s culturally elitist. (“The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton.”) Fourth, and most importantly, “It’s foreign…Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European.”

Soccer hatred, in other words, exemplifies American exceptionalism.

For Coulter and many contemporary conservatives, by contrast, part of what makes America exceptional is its individualism, manliness and populism

Over the course of just a few days Donald Trump has gone from saying that we might have to close down mosques and create a Muslim registry to saying that not only will we do this but we have to do it and anything less is an utter capitulation.

In other words, rapidly evolving from refusing to rule out a draconian policy to affirmatively endorsing it to being its leading advocate.

With his Muslim ID card and database, Wednesday he said he wouldn't rule out creating such a system. By the end of the day he was telling NBC News he would "absolutely" create such a system.

in a self-report questionnaire completed by more than 80,000 American adults, self-control ranked lowest among 24 strengths of character.

three out of four parents said they thought self-control has declined in the past half-century.

Without a time machine that allows us to travel backward and compare Americans from different decades on the same self-control measures, we can’t be sure. Indeed, the scant scientific evidence on the question suggests that if anything, the capacity to delay gratification may be increasing.