it’s time to kill this mistaken idea once and for all. Basically everything in modern agriculture is unnatural. “The cereal crops we eat bear little resemblance to their naturally selected ancestors, and the environments in which we grow them are equally highly manipulated and engineered by us,” she writes. “We have, over the last 10,000 years, bred out of our main food plants all kinds of survival strategies that natural selection put in.”

“Agriculture is the invention of humans,” she adds. “It is the deliberate manipulation of plants (and animals) and the environment in which they grow to provide food for us. The imperative is not that we should stop interfering with nature, but that we should interfere in the best way possible to provide a reliable, sustainable, equitable supply of nutritious food.”

Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.

while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.

one gets more liberal, the more he or she wants elected officials who compromise.

Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again.

When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write

By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was significantly weaker.

Judy Y. Chu reports on her two-year study in which she followed a group of boys from pre-kindergarten through first grade.

She concluded that most of what we think of as "boy" behavior isn't natural or authentic to boys, but is something they learn to perform. Boys aren't stoic or aggressive or hierarchical; they aren't bad at forming relationships or unable to express themselves. They pick up all these traditional traits of masculinity by adapting to a culture that expects and demands that they do so.

it seems like they become boys through learning from other boys; it's boys teaching themselves to be boys. So where do you see the inauthenticity or unnaturalness there?

An internal investigation released on Thursday into the company’s failure to recall millions of defective small cars found no evidence of a cover-up. But interviews with victims, their lawyers and current and former G.M. employees, as well as evidence in the report itself, paint a more complete picture: The automaker’s legal department took actions that obscured the deadly flaw, both inside and outside the company.

“That says to me that the G.M. lawyers were involved in keeping the ignition failure secret case by case,” said Mr. Zitrin, who has helped draft new federal legislation that would make it difficult for corporations to enter into confidential settlements.

The secrecy factor extended to how some employees kept or discarded old emails. According to two former G.M. officials, company lawyers conducted annual audits of some employees’ emails that could be used as evidence in lawsuits against the company.

The Daily Currant is a fake-news site of a different stripe: one entirely devoid of jokes. Whether this humorlessness is intentional or not—the site's founder contends his critics don't have a sense of subtlety—the site's business model as an ad-driven clickbait-generator relies on it. When Currant stories go viral, it's not because their satire contains essential truths, but rather because their satire is taken as truth—and usually that "truth" is engineered to outrage a particular frequency of the political spectrum. As Slate's Josh Voorhees wrote after Drudge fell for the Bloomberg story, "It's a classic Currant con, one that relies on its mark wanting to believe a particular story is true." 

The Daily Currant's headlines don’t engage in subtlety so much as fail entirely to signal humorous intention. That would be acceptable, perhaps even clever, if the stories themselves skillfully exploited the reader's initial credulity, the copy growing increasingly ludicrous until the reader realizes the joke. Instead, jokes sometimes materialize in the final lines, but they’re half-baked at best. The VA story ends with Obama dismissing calls for officials to resign. "Why," Obama asks, "would holding people accountable for their actions be necessary?” That neither funny nor satirical. But it rings true to partisans who genuinely believe that Obama thinks that way—the same people who, in a flash of outrage, are most likely to share the story on social media.

in order to pursue their intellectual adventures, children need a secure social base:

The way to discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education. These formulas are stultifying

The lesson from childhood, then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

The confrontations with the publishers are the biggest display of Amazon’s dominance since it briefly stripped another publisher, Macmillan, of its “buy” buttons in 2010. It seems likely to encourage debate about the concentration of power by the retailer. No firm in American history has exerted the control over the American book market — physical, digital and secondhand — that Amazon does.

For more than 40 years, Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” has been the canonical anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-American text in that region

now Mr. Galeano, a 73-year-old Uruguayan writer, has disavowed the book, saying that he was not qualified to tackle the subject and that it was badly written. Predictably, his remarks have set off a vigorous regional debate, with the right doing some “we told you so” gloating, and the left clinging to a dogged defensiveness.

 ‘Open Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation,” Mr. Galeano said last month while answering questions at a book fair in Brazil, where he was being honored on the 43rd anniversary of the book’s publication. He added: “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me, this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it

Face-matching today could enable mass surveillance, “basically robbing everyone of their anonymity,” he says, and inhibit people’s normal behavior outside their homes.

Dr. Atick says the technology he helped cultivate requires some special safeguards. Unlike fingerprinting or other biometric techniques, face recognition can be used at a distance, without people’s awareness; it could then link their faces and identities to the many pictures they have put online. But in the United States, no specific federal law governs face recognition.

some casinos faceprint visitors, seeking to identify repeat big-spending customers for special treatment. In Japan, a few grocery stores use face-matching to classify some shoppers as shoplifters or even “complainers” and blacklist them.

why would the senator make such a statement? The answer is that like that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity.

how support for a false dogma can become politically mandatory, and how overwhelming contrary evidence only makes such dogmas stronger and more extreme.

Why the bad behavior? Nobody likes admitting to mistakes, and all of us — even those of us who try not to — sometimes engage in motivated reasoning, selectively citing facts to support our preconceptions.

"Magna Cortica is the argument that we need to have a guidebook for both the design spec and ethical rules around the increasing power and diversity of cognitive augmentation," said IFTF distinguished fellow, Jamais Cascio. "There are a lot of pharmaceutical and digital tools that have been able to boost our ability to think. Adderall, Provigil, and extra-cortical technologies."

Back in 2008, 20 percent of scientists reported using brain-enhancing drugs. And I spoke with dozens of readers who had complex regimens, including, for example, a researcher at the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. "We aren't the teen clubbers popping uppers to get through a hard day running a cash register after binge drinking," the researcher told me. "We are responsible humans." Responsible humans trying to get an edge in incredibly competitive and cognitively demanding fields. 

part of Google Glass's divisiveness stems from its prospective ability to enhance one's social awareness or provide contextual help in conversations; the company Social Radar has already released an app for Glass that shows social network information for people who are in the same location as you are. A regular app called MindMeld listens to conference calls and provides helpful links based on what the software hears you talking about.

one of the most depressing features of the decline of conservative thinking in the US has been the resistance to the overwhelming data behind carbon and climate change

The world’s climate is changing; and it will mean huge challenges for humanity’s habitat. I simply cannot see why any sane person would not wish to try and mitigate that change or prepare for such an eventuality. It’s not about ideology so much as simple prudence. Even if you view the likelihood of a much warmer planet as small, its huge potential impact still makes it worth confronting. Low-probability-high-impact events are like that. And conservatives, properly understood, attend to such contingent problems prudently

I almost never see problems caused by underconfidence, but I see (and create) problems related to overconfidence every day.

Much of the recent psychological research also suggests that overconfidence is our main cognitive problem, not the reverse. Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” describes an exhaustive collection of experiments demonstrating how often people come to conclusions confidently and wrongly

my second reaction is to notice that people are phenomenally terrible at estimating their own self-worth. Some Americans seem to value themselves ridiculously too little while others value themselves ridiculously too highly.

To the public, collapse is a term applied to a heart attack victim on a street corner or a building stricken by an earthquake or bomb. To a glaciologist, it describes the transition to unavoidable loss of an ice sheet — a process that can take centuries to get into gear, and millenniums to complete.

Collapse in the imagination of most people sounds like a catastrophic event that is going to happen in the next few years. We are talking about a retreat that is unstoppable because we think we have enough evidence to say that these glaciers will keep retreating for decades and even centuries to come…. We’re talking about a slow degradation of ice in this part of Antarctica.