With Fox News receiving some well-deserved bad PR of late -- from their photographic doctoring of two New York Times staffers to the backlash against their aggressive public relations techniques -- there is no better time for critiques of the machine that has taken the idea of "objective"...

On Sunday, the NY Times website listed two articles back-to-back in the Science section that, at first glance, seemed unrelated. In terms of content, that is true; in terms of how we understand and experience the world, they are too close for anyone's comfort.

The first was titled "Einstein Letter...

By the time the Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled Tibet in March, 1959, he had gone through a steady period of disillusion with Chinese officials, who had been offering much lip service to communism -- a philosophy he thought was, in theory, practical and promising. The reality of those officials, spearheaded...

In the 1970s, Professor J. Scott Armstrong put forth a conundrum to close to 2,000 business school students and executive trainees. Intrigued by the corporatizing of the pharmaceutical industry, he created a scenario (based on an actual 1969 incident) in which a company has a new drug with a projected...

A recent series of commercials produced by MTV's youth networking website, Think MTV, poses an interesting conundrum to the modern television viewer. Using the Holocaust as the backdrop for what could befall America if we are "not careful," the 30-second spots questions the integrity of the network for using an...

I find it interesting that between two polarities being expressed regarding the role of religion in mainstream politics -- the recent over-saturation of Barack Obama's affiliations/non-affiliations with Jeremiah Wright, and the elucidating essay by Sam Harris on this site -- there has not been any discussion of religious symbols...

Remember that scenario from the first in the series of Batman remakes, when a pre-Hillary Jack Nicholson nearly killed the population of Gotham by poisoning the water? And remember just a few years ago, when the U.S. government used the same trickery to make its citizens believe that those evil...

While the Democratic debate has turned into an all-out popularity contest, and the most-discussed issues continue to be the economy, oil and war, there are two topics that none of the three candidates have really honed in on. They all spend a lot of time dancing around the perimeters, yet...

We can't quite argue that "New Amerykah Part 1 (4th World War)" is the highlight of your career, because you've always been making serious records. There has certainly been a progression of experimentation since the Baduizm days, though ever since "On & On" you've been spinning circles with your...

In 1976, Bob Marley released Rastaman Vibration, which included what has become of his most memorable songs, "War." In it he took the text of Ethiopian king Haile Selassie's 1963 UN Conference speech and set it to music. The song (like the speech itself), while geared toward the liberation and...

There's a scene in the world's oldest story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the king and his best friend Enkidu travel to the Cedar Forest to slay the evil demon, Humbaba. Gilgamesh ruled his city with a mighty fist, and anyone that would challenge his philosophy — his way, or...