John Jay Hopkins’s visit to Japan in 1955, as an informal emissary of “Atoms for Peace,” must have seemed surreal to everyone involved. Hopkins was the head of an old American…

In their film, The Witness Is a Whale, filmmakers Nick and Cheryl Dean take us on a remarkable journey to understand the private lives of whales and their societies in the sea as revealed…

Last month, Harvard University named a new Chief Chaplain: Greg Epstein, an atheist. As reported in The New York Times,1 Epstein, the campus humanist chaplain, was unanimously elected…

If we medically insulate, or precipitously shield, emerging adults from introspection and struggle, from the work of figuring out life’s big questions, it could prevent them from…

On March 11, 2021, the auction house Christie’s sold a work by an American graphic designer, Michael Winkelmann, a.k.a. Beeple, for a colossal $69 million, making it the third most…

Humans have always strived to develop technologies that give us some control, or at least the feelings of control, over the challenges that life throws at us. Psychologists like me…

Requiring vaccine passports would not violate any individual rights that a well-ordered society would choose to defend.Photograph by FrankHH / ShutterstockThe latest surge in COVID-19…

Last month, having returned to Earth aboard his Blue Origin spacecraft, Jeffrey Bezos, the chairman of Amazon and, as of this month, the richest person alive with over $200 billion,…

Researching my upcoming book on film, Suddenly Something Clicked, I was struck by something that had not occurred to me in 50 years of film editing. In closeups and medium closeups,…

Stable cultural forms do not have to result from close replication; they can emerge continuously out of subtle changes.Illustration by VectorMine / ShutterstockSomething about me must…