Andrew Sullivan on Friendfeed

"Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses...

Conor Williams makes the case: The first option looks to religion for substantial political content. Call it “Ideological Religion.” People who approach politics in this way troll their sacred texts, papal encyclicals, past sermons, and other religious documents in search...

E.J. Dionne has written a fascinating book, Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, which you can buy here. A taste: At the heart of this book is the view that American...

Joe Kraus worries about it: Numerous brain imaging studies have shown that what we call “multi-tasking” in humans, is not multi-tasking at all. Your brain is merely trying to rapidly switch it’s attention between two tasks. Back and forth, as...

Katie Hosmer admires recent work by Portuguese street artist Vhils aka Alexandre Farto: In a matter of days, the amazing artist used hammers to chip away at the wall, creating this exceptionally detailed portrait. He says his motivation for removing...

Andrée Seu Peterson recounts what convinced her to take her husband's name: When nothing else was working my true love said to me, “Andrée, ultimately I’m not that important to you.” It was the last resort in a drawn out...

From the end of "In Praise Of Limestone" by W.H. Auden: In so far as we have to look forward To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from...

Revealed: Old and young people do give off distinctive odors, according to a study just published online in the journal PLoS ONE. Researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and Sweden's Karolinska Institute found that people can reliably...

How to stare at the sun without going blind: The loops represent plasma held in place by magnetic fields. They are concentrated in "active regions" where the magnetic fields are the strongest. These active regions usually appear in visible light...

In an excerpt from his new book, Nassim Taleb argues that "as you consume more data, and the ratio of noise to signal increases, the less you know what’s going on and the more inadvertent trouble you are likely to...

A primer on how we learned to measure it: Mike Springer marvels: The video was made for “Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos,” an exhibit that will be on display at the...

A theory.

Mo Costandi explains the strange phenomenon of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), a "rare condition characterized by a burning and incessant desire to amputate an otherwise perfectly healthy limb." Costandi supports giving sufferers the amputations the desire: Psychotherapy and drugs...

Geophysicist Robert Hazen doubts that "people fully appreciate the extent to which life has played a role in geology, how the biosphere and the geosphere co-evolved." For example: [T]wo-thirds of all the minerals on Earth were formed as a consequence...

Statistician Hans Rosling rejects the argument that religion dictates birth rate: A summary: In this talk, statistician Hans Rosling looks at whether, globally, religion impacts national fertility rates. His conclusion? Nah, not really. He also points out that while fertility...

Alva Noë argues that experiences, not individual attributes, largely determine our actions: The best way to find out what people will do is not to look into their hearts, or their brains; it's simply to understand the situation they are...

Adam Lee contemplates how anti-aging therapy might challenge those who believe: [W]hen we invent a real treatment for aging - when we can stop people from growing old, when we can rejuvenate ourselves at will - that will be the...

Vienna, Austria, 2.42 pm

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it,...

Mark O'Connell explains why he's more drawn to Marilynn Robinson’s "Christian humanism" than "to the Dawkins-Dennett-Hitchens-Harris school of anti-theist fighting talk": She makes an atheist reader like myself capable of identifying with the sense of a fallen world that is...

Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, inimitable contriver, endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon, thank you for such as it is my gift. I have made up a morning prayer to you containing with...

Lucid dreaming apps and specialty eye masks are aiding the effort: Created by psychologist Richard Wiseman, the app [Dream:ON] has seen over half a million downloads in just six weeks. "The new wave of interest is led by technology," says...

Geoff Nicholson suggests sushi: Indeed, the first rule of naked dining is this: Hot food is generally to be avoided. ... Not only is [sushi] temperature-appropriate, but there are hundreds of years of history behind it, according to the Japanese...

Tokyo, Japan, 8 pm

Marina Adshade weighs the economic benefits of having a significant other: All the data I have seen suggests that the men who have sex the least frequently, after men who have no sex at all, are those who report having...

Andrew Palmer has watched a decade of The Bachelor(ette) and confesses in earnestness that the show has "taught me as much about myself and the world as all other TV shows and Edmund Spenser combined": No TV show is sadder...

A primer for the novice drinker: I call our ability to translate taste into words “taste literacy.” We learn visual literacy from a tender age, and as adults can distinguish even subtle gradations in the visual field. If I say...

Jesus Diaz gawks at a recent dermatology case published in the New England Journal of Medicine: This guy is 69 years old, but half of his face looks much, much older than that. He was a trucker and, for 28...

Daniel Kahneman examines why we love them: We can't help but look at life retrospectively, and we want it to look good in retrospect. There was once an experiment in which the subjects were supposed to evaluate the life of...

Life in fast-forward: