LIFE ON MARS: IMAGINING THE FIRST CITY ON THE RED PLANET

There are few more prolific Americans than the Harvard scholar, activist and athlete Cass Sunstein. The author of almost 30 books (including the best-selling Nudge) as well as an influential advisor in the Presidencies o…

Can we humans make it to 2125? According to Gary F. Bengier, author of Journey to 2125, our species faces three existential threats over the next 100 years. His horsemen of the apocalypse are climate change, nuclear war…

For anyone who has seen Michael B. Jordan’s excellent new movie Sinners, it’s clear that any sort of deal with the devil - what has become known as the Faustian Bargain - is still very much alive. So relevant, in fact, t…

How to bring peace to Gaza and Ukraine? Maybe the United Nations can help. Or, sadly, maybe not. But there really was a time, in the second half of the 20th century, when the United Nations could help bring peace to supp…

Lead in gasoline powered cars have killed more people than those that died in World War Two. That’s the astonishing claim of David Obst who, in his new Saving Ourselves From Big Car, lays out a strategy to kick our self-…

There is no more shakespearean parable of the tragic rise and fall of the postwar American meritocratic elite than Robert Strange McNamara. War hero, Harvard Business School, head of Ford, begged by JFK to take a role -…

Dumb globalization: America’s worst bet. That, at least, is the view of the Washington Post financial writer David J Lynch and author of The World’s Worst Bet. From Clinton to Bush, Lynch argues, America has bet stupidly…

In our angry MAHA times, how can we get people trusting science and scientists again. According to MIT’s Alan Lightman, one of America’s greatest scientific writers, we need to both demystify science and humanize scienti…

The human brain is so unbelievably complex that we barely understand its most basic functions. According to the British neuroscientist Daniel Yon, our brains - which some speculate are the most mysteriously complicated t…

According to former college president Beverly Daniel Tatum, Trump’s war on university admissions is deeply hypocritical. On the one hand, she argues, his attack on affirmative action admissions policy is made in the popu…

Globalization is dying, maybe even dead. Borders are back, baby. That’s the message in Jonn Elledge’s sparkling Brief History of the World in 47 Borders. In this romp around world history , Elledge introduces us to 47 of…

When somebody says “win-win” in Silicon Valley, check your pockets. It’s usually some elaborate prelude to a sales pitch. And the only thing dodgier than a two-way win is the “win-win-win” narrative that my friend Keith…

It’s only been a quarter century, but IN FORMATION magazine is now back. Published by David Temkin with the tagline “Every Day, Computers are Making People Easier to Use”, IN FORMATION was originally designed in 1998 as…

Is the convicted sex criminal Roman Polanski worth defending? Particularly in the context of “An Officer and a Spy”, his vaguely autobiographical 2019 movie about the Dreyfus case, the first Polanski film in a decade to…

It's become the new orthodoxy: social media is the cause of the epidemic of anxiety amongst adolescents. So the way to fix this is by taking away their smartphones. But according to Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times…