The World Cup is now over, but before closing that file, it might be useful to go back to one incident to ask a more general question about soccer. Shortly...
Last month, at the Sea World amusement park in Florida, a killer whale grabbed a trainer, Dawn Brancheau, pulled her underwater, and thrashed about with her....
All over the world, people have responded generously to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti. In just three days, more than 1 million Americans had...
Did you make any New Year’s resolutions? Perhaps you resolved to get fit, to lose weight, to save more money, or to drink less alcohol. Or your...
Last month, Gecko Systems announced that it had been running trials of its “fully autonomous personal companion home care robot,” also known as a...
Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the “slippery slope”: Once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will...
What we are doing to our planet, to our children and grandchildren, and to the poor, by our heedless production of greenhouse gases, is one of the great moral...
The arrest in New York last month of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn businessman whom police allege tried to broker a deal to buy a kidney for $160,000,...
The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote: "Two things fill the heart with ever renewed and increasing awe and reverence, the more often and...
Last month, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning "defamation of religion" as a human rights violation. According to the...
Is the global financial crisis an opportunity to forge a new form of capitalism based on sound values? So French President Nicholas Sarkozy and former British...
The astonishing story of Barack Obama's election as president has already done much to restore America's global image. In place of a president whose only...
Barack Obama worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's blighted South Side, so he knows all about the real poverty that exists in America....
When people say that "money is the root of all evil," they usually don't mean that money itself is the root of evil. Like Saint Paul, from whom the quote...
Jesus said that we should give alms in private rather than when others are watching. That fits with the commonsense idea that if people only do good in...
After a century that saw two world wars, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's Gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, and more recent atrocities in Rwanda and now...
As an Australian citizen, I voted in the recent federal election there. So did about 95 percent of registered Australian voters. That figure contrasts...
The intersection of genetics and intelligence is an intellectual minefield. Harvard's former president, Larry Summers, touched off one explosion in 2005 when...
Ten years after her death, Princess Diana still has star power. The media are filled with tributes and retrospectives, and all over the world, the public...
There is now a regular season for discussing drugs in sports, one that arrives every year with the Tour de France. This year, the overall leader, two other...
The agreement on climate change reached at Heiligendamm by the Group of Eight leaders merely sets the stage for the real debate to come: How will we divide up...
If you were to walk along the streets of your neighborhood with your face up and an open expression, how many of those who passed you would smile, or greet...
When we condemn the behavior of a politician, celebrity, or friend, we often end up appealing to our moral intuitions. "It just feels wrong!" we say. But...
In commemorating the 230th anniversary of America's independence last July, President George W. Bush noted that the patriots of the Revolutionary War believed...
On December 21, an Italian doctor, Mario Riccio, disconnected a respirator that was keeping Piergiorgio Welby alive. Welby, who suffered from muscular...