It's Not Theft, It's Pastiche
College students plagiarize routinely, especially from the Internet.
Posted: Monday, April 20, 2009
In surveys, nearly 70% of college students admit to having taken material from the Internet without properly crediting its source. Ms. Blum comes not to scold these miscreants but to understand their motives. "If more than half of all students plagiarize," she reasons, "then there is clearly some cultural influence urging them to do so."  [Full Story]

Machines That Won't Shut Up

Posted: Monday, April 13, 2009
It would be wonderful if the text-to-speech revolution enhanced our brain's functioning, causing us to learn faster and remember more. But somehow a major cognitive transformation seems doubtful. And there are reasons for concern, too -- not least the effect on other aspects of life as those strange artificial voices compete for our attention and require us to enter feedback loops normally reserved for, well, actual human beings.  [Full Story]

Call Them the Ishmaels
How a reformer claimed to discover the effects of undeserved charity.
Posted: Thursday, January 15, 2009
The lack of an aristocracy has not prevented Americans from manufacturing one. The early Republic had the Adams family, and the Gilded Age the Astors and Vanderbilts. But we have also proved adept at creating a kind of anti-aristocracy -- families known not for their wealth or prestige but for the threat they have supposedly posed to the social order.  [Full Story]

Examining our Techological Assumptions

Posted: Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The University Bookman presents an interview with EPPC Fellow Christine Rosen, one of the most prominent writers on issues such as history of genetics, bioethics, the fertility industry, and the social impact of technology.  [Full Story]

The Bare Necessities
Marketing Luxury Goods in a Bad Economy
Posted: Monday, December 22, 2008
Perhaps we should follow the advice of high-end companies like DeBeers and "reassess what really matters." If we do, we might discover that this current recession is a good opportunity to break our luxury fever.  [Full Story]

When Books Were Great
Furrowing the American middlebrow.
Posted: Thursday, December 18, 2008
The death of reading has been much in the news lately, and so Alex Beam's new book, a rollicking tour of the Great Books movement that flourished in the United States in the 1940s and '50s, is timely indeed. With fluid prose and a sense of humor about the terrifying earnestness that often permeated the Great Books enterprise, Beam gives the movement the respect it deserves but does not avoid pointing out its excesses and missteps.  [Full Story]

Nestled in the Lap of Luxury

Posted: Friday, October 31, 2008
In times of economic crisis, with thoughts of austerity and thrift in our minds, it is amusing to come across the hyper-consumerism of only the day before yesterday. Catalogs for kids, in particular, are now almost self-parodies of vanished excess. If we are what we buy, then what do these catalogs -- with their vision of a childhood spent among perfect playthings -- tell us about ourselves?  [Full Story]

Remaking Humanity

Posted: Monday, September 8, 2008
When historians study hubris, they usually tell stories about the dazzling, cruel, or ill-fated exploits of specific people--presidents, dictators, revolutionaries. In Fatal Misconception, Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, looks instead at an idea: controlling human reproduction.  [Full Story]

The Myth of Multitasking 

Posted: Monday, July 14, 2008
In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people--so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.  [Full Story]

A Life Worth Living

Posted: Monday, June 30, 2008
Harriet McBryde Johnson forced us to look at disability in a different way -- not as something that we should seek to eradicate, but as something that is integral to the human condition, a "natural part of the human experience," as the American Association of People With Disabilities puts it.  [Full Story]