Choosing which human brain to install in the Oval Office for the next four years is a daunting and demanding task. Some would even say it is scary.
For sure, it is a serious enough task that we should take a look at what we know about how our brains consistently deal with this messy, unpredictable [...]

What in the world was she thinking?
You know exactly whom I’m talking about. And you, surely, share my sense that Sarah Louise really wasn’t really thinking yesterday when she gave her “why I’m resigning” speech to the geese and others in Alaska. At least, she wasn’t thinking as we typically define the word. “Thinking” in [...]

Not for nothing is it called neuro-linguistic programming (“NLP” to the cognoscenti). And while he isn’t necessarily viewed as one of NLP’s gurus, one of the leading postmodern brain-oriented linguists came to Texas the other day to remind us just how practical some of the suppositions of the brain-as-spokesperson inquiry have become.
George Lakoff has [...]

Listen, if you will, to this wise and highly topical counsel for Americans interested in effective, responsible, long-term, and long-“visioned” governance. I quote. And quote. And quote. And quote. And quote. And quote:
• The problem of governance in the United States is mainly one of creating institutions or governing arrangements that can pursue policies of [...]

On the one hand, scientific proof is growing that George W. Bush is a very intelligent man. The argument centers on knowledge that has become so widespread that it’s something of a worldwide joke: the president is so good at, so at home with, so nonchalant about . . . lying. And, on the other [...]

Goofing around the other day in the jazillion or so bytes of information stored on my hard drive, I came across an item I wrote as an op-end piece in the fall of 2000, during the U.S. presidential election run-up. Well, it was intended to be an op-ed piece. As it turned out, it was [...]

Thanks to invaluable assistance from “the most notable living Polish philosopher” (Wikipeida), Leszek Kołakowski, now at All Souls College, Oxford, I think I’ve figured out what my real political orientation is. I am a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist with the following views (all borrowed, most liberally and described most conservatively, in a very social sense, from Kolakowski):
A conservative [...]

I seek to break the news gently but if there is someone in my seminars of a somewhat fundamentalist Christian streak, it is invariably disconcerting when it gets revealed that the two brains that intrigue me most in history are those of Shakespeare and Jesus Christ, in that order.
Neither choice is by any means unique, [...]

As I read The New York Times each morning, I sometimes feel like we have returned to a more (much more) complex version of the 1920s.
Wal-Mart is plotting to force older employees to quit because they’ll use more health care. Gillette is alleged to be allowing its packaging contractors to treat temporary workers like Nike [...]

What follows is a very long quote by the standards of length I intend for quotes in this space. My rules are violated in this instance because of my intense interest in the troubling issues produced by the increased commingling of church and state in America today.
The speaker is the philosopher George Santayana. The passage [...]