Hurricane Katrina has unleashed a fury of misinformation over the link between global warming and hurricanes. Many reporters, politicians, and academics have wrongly asserted that the frequency of hurricanes has increased due to global warming. Their oft-cited “proof” is the high number of hurricanes that ravaged the Florida coast last year. The reality is no [...]
A black essayist writes in this week’s Time magazine about falling out of love with hip-hop and in love with White Music. His journey is a thought-provoking commentary on the influence of race and other social pressures over what reaches our ears. There is universality in his tale of moving from Public Enemy to Bjork–fears [...]
As I grabbed an article on the emerging role of mathematics in the biological sciences a few weeks back from the Public Library of Science (PLoS), I was thinking about how wonderful it was to be able to access the article (and their entire archive) for free. For the previous four years, I had taken [...]
Salon posted an immensely informative article on the stem cell debate today. Writing in a question and answer format, Farhad Manjoo manages to cover the entire spectrum of issues surrounding stem cells in his piece: what an embryo is, the relationship of embryos to in vitro fertilization, an explanation of cell line quality, the argument [...]
One of the few outposts of actual debate on the Internet is the aptly named ‘dialogues’ section of Slate. This section, appearing periodically in the online magazine, captures the essence of debate: flushing out arguments and discussing their merits and faults. It is a pleasure to read because the back and forth arguments give insight [...]