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The militants put him through their infamous indoctrination courses, which instilled an unexpected radicalism in his mind. He had been living as an infidel, far from God, he learned, and obeying ISIS would bring him close. He was soon marching eagerly toward a violent death.

“I thought ISIS would be able to fight the regime if they built their Islamic state, because the regime is a state, and only a state can fight a state,” he said. “But they are just like the regime. They told the Syrian people that if you are not with us, then you are our enemy. And they committed terrible crimes.”

I was telling people they are human,” he said. “It’s haram” — forbidden — “to rape them and sell them and treat them like this. But their only answer was that they are infidels. They don’t understand human language.”

The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.

Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.

I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.

Readers of the Guardian Science pages may not have noticed the group called Historians for Britain, or a recent piece in History Today by David Abulafia asserting their belief “that Britain’s unique history sets it apart from the rest of Europe”.

It requires critical scrutiny from everyone with an interest in Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world, and in evidence-based political discussion.

Abilafia’s article is a classic example of an old-fashioned “Whiggish” narrative. It claims a uniquely moderate and progressive advance toward the development of British institutions, traced continuously from Magna Carta and isolated from the rages and radicalism of the Continent.

Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.

And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”

devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

While the majority of jihadists around the world are not teenagers, official figures show that their involvement in violent Islamism is growing.The number of under-18s arrested for alleged terror offences in the UK almost doubled from eight to 15 from 2013-14 to 2014-15.

Experts say this bears out fears that more and more young people are being drawn to extremism, with followers in their early teens among them. "We are seeing this kind of thing happening more and more with the rise of Islamic State," says Charlie Winter, an expert in jihadist militancy.

The main target for groups like Islamic State is said to be young people between 16 and 24 years old.However the radicalisation process can start as early as 11 or 12

called for a ban on the entry of Muslims into the United States, much of the rest of the world on Tuesday looked at the American presidential election with a mix of befuddlement and despair.

ignited widespread condemnation that crossed ideological and social lines in many countries.

Mr. Trump, like others, fuels hatred,” and “Our only enemy is radical Islamism.”

once famously saying he would find Chechen terrorists sitting in the “outhouse” and “rub them out.”

He and President Trump, notably dismissive of political correctness, would seem to have found common language on fighting terrorism — except on one point of, well, language.

criticized President Obama for declining to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”

For the BRIC rising economies -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- what can be learned by looking at the rise of powers throughout history?

production in "all organic economies was set by the annual cycle of plant growth" -- it limits food, fuel, fiber, and building materials. Coal changed all that. By digging into the earth to get minerals instead of growing fuel on the earth, you get a vastly more efficient source of fuel and completely change the rules of the game. You've shifted from an organic economy, as he calls it, to an energy-rich economy. But the economic reprieve the fossil fuels offered could be nearing an end, as global supply becomes more competitive.

Historians still debate the nature and causes of the Industrial Revolution, but one thing they seem to agree on is that the it wasn't just industrial -- it was demographic and agricultural as well. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, populations all over the globe had non-negotiable checks on their growth: too many people and you get ecological crises and famines to push the number back down. In the 18th and 19th centuries, England managed to solve this problem, with tremendous leaps in population and urbanization as a result.

The British astrophysicist Arthur S. Eddington once wrote, “No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory.”

Adding to the sense of finality was the simple fact — as Eddington might have pointed out — that faster-than-light neutrinos had never been confirmed by theory. Or as John G. Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, put it in an e-mail, “An interesting result of all this fracas is that no new model I have seen (or heard of from my friends) really is credible to explain the faster-than-light neutrinos.”

Eddington’s dictum is not as radical as it might sound. He made it after early measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe made it appear that our planet was older than the cosmos in which it resides — an untenable notion. “It means that science is not just a book of facts, it is understanding as well,”

The premise is that politics and economics are separate realms, and we are “creating a culture” of division by dragging politics into such things as economic transactions. One could hardly better encapsulate the reality we live under, where economics have completely replaced politics. That’s pretty much the definition of classical liberalism: true politics, where human values are disputed, are expected to be sublimated by economic transactions.

The winner is the corporation, which can now reap the profits of a society where no human value is allowed to be more important than a business deal. (If you question that orthodoxy, you’re likely to be labeled a “radical” or a “partisan,” or better yet, just “too political.”) This ideology owes its entire existence to the need for capitalists to keep human values out of the way of the market. Above all, it must keep politics a dirty word, because people who know what politics are and how to use them can cause trouble for capitalists very quickly.

our commercial and our political lives are already completely intermeshed, because under the current regime we basically only have commercial lives. The only political power to be had in the United States is money, and even if you don’t have enough to make a corporation hurt, how you consume is one of the few expressions of political will open to the average citizen. They may not have enough money to shake the economy, and may not even when pooled with a large group of like-minded people. But a visceral awareness that money is politics is an excellent first step toward the average person realizing his or her political agency and taking responsibility for it.

we need a new way of thinking about our informational milieu. What we need is a concept of infopolitics that would help us understand the increasingly dense ties between politics and information

Infopolitics encompasses not only traditional state surveillance and data surveillance, but also “data analytics” (the techniques that enable marketers at companies like Target to detect, for instance, if you are pregnant), digital rights movements (promoted by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation), online-only crypto-currencies (like Bitcoin or Litecoin), algorithmic finance (like automated micro-trading) and digital property disputes (from peer-to-peer file sharing to property claims in the virtual world of Second Life)

Surveying this iceberg is crucial because atop it sits a new kind of person: the informational person. Politically and culturally, we are increasingly defined through an array of information architectures: highly designed environments of data, like our social media profiles, into which we often have to squeeze ourselves

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business

Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.

It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.

Tokyo University, known as Todai, is Japan’s best. Its exacting entry test requires years of cramming to pass and can defeat even the most erudite. Most current computers, trained in data crunching, fail to understand its natural language tasks altogether. Ms. Arai has set researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, where she works, the task of developing a machine that can jump the lofty Todai bar by 2021. If they succeed, she said, such a machine should be capable, with appropriate programming, of doing many — perhaps most — jobs now done by university graduates.

There is a significant danger, Ms. Arai says, that the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, if not well managed, could lead to a radical restructuring of economic activity and the job market, outpacing the ability of social and education systems to adjust.

Intelligent machines could be used to replace expensive human resources, potentially undermining the economic value of much vocational education, Ms. Arai said.

I think most people’s ideas of science fiction are formed by Hollywood movies, so they think most science fiction is a special effects-driven story revolving around a battle between good and evil

I don’t think of that as a science fiction story. You can tell a good-versus-evil story in any time period and in any setting. Setting it in the future and adding robots to it doesn’t make it a science fiction story.

I think science fiction is fundamentally a post-industrial revolution form of storytelling. Some literary critics have noted that the good-versus-evil story follows a pattern where the world starts out as a good place, evil intrudes, the heroes fight and eventually defeat evil, and the world goes back to being a good place. Those critics have said that this is fundamentally a conservative storyline because it’s about maintaining the status quo. This is a common story pattern in crime fiction, too—there’s some disruption to the order, but eventually order is restored. Science fiction offers a different kind of story, a story where the world starts out as recognizable and familiar but is disrupted or changed by some new discovery or technology. At the end of the story, the world is changed permanently. The original condition is never restored. And so in this sense, this story pattern is progressive because its underlying message is not that you should maintain the status quo, but that change is inevitable. The consequences of this new discovery or technology—whether they’re positive or negative—are here to stay and we’ll have to deal with them.

Art & Design Books Film Ideas Music & Performance TV & Radio Food & Drink Blog Return to: Home | Culture | Books The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now By George Levine Reviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011 82 comments Print version Email a friend Listen RSS Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.

Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere

Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't.

Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science.

the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.”

Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life. 

economists have increasingly become the go-to experts on every manner of business and public policy issue facing society

The economics profession that Mr. Thaler entered in the early 1970s was deeply invested in proving that it was more than a mere social science

To achieve the same mathematical precision of hard sciences, economists made a radically simplifying assumption that people are “optimizers” whose behavior is as predictable as the speed of physical body falling through space.

the book is part memoir, part attack on a breed of economist who dominated the academy – particularly, the Chicago School that dominated economic theory at the University of Chicago – for the much of the latter part of the 20th century.

economists have increasingly become the go-to experts on every manner of business and public policy issue facing society.

rather than being a disgruntled former employee or otherwise easily marginalized whistle-blower, Mr. Thaler recently took the reins as president of the American Economic Association (and still teaches at Chicago’s graduate business program

Modern foreign language learning in secondary schools in Wales is "declining rapidly" according to a major study

The education minister has now announced "a radical and new approach" including schools which will be centres of excellence.

In 2005, 12,826 children studied a language at GCSE, but by 2014 the number had fallen by a third to 8,601.