You've heard the saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Journalist David Rieff thinks that's rubbish, and he says if you want peace, it's sometimes better to forget historical crimes than try to get justice.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Exploding urbanism might be the biggest global innovation challenge, Chris Anderson says.
Terry Tempest Williams has spent much of her life trying to understand her mother - both a private woman and a trickster. Her memoir is also an exploration of silence and finding one's voice.
Summer festivals are a huge part of the American music scene -- and of the music marketplace. Why do millions of people risk sunburn and dehydration when they could hear the same music better with earbuds? Music critic Maura Johnston unpacks the economics and the atavistic lure of the summer music festival.
Larry Brilliant is a doctor, co-founder of the digital social network the Well, and he was the first executive director of Google.org. But back in the Sixties, he was a hippie doctor who joined Wavy Gravy's traveling bus caravan and then landed in an Indian ashram in the Himalayas, where his guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox. Miraculously, his U.N. team of doctors eradicated the world's remaining cases of this terrible disease. He tells Steve Paulson about a remarkable moment in history when anything seemed possible.
Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote a history of beauty. A few years later, he followed it up with a study of ugliness. Here’s what he found
Robert Zubrin explains how he thinks we should go about colonizing Mars, and how settling a new world will save this one. And he describes how NASA’s using his ideas.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
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