By Amanda Ripley from Time. "Since there have been children, there have been adults trying to get them to cooperate. The Bible repeatedly commands children to heed their parents and proposes that disobedient children be stoned to death or at least have their eyes picked out by ravens. Over the centuries...

By Nick Clegg from Gaurdian . "I basically believe people are born good. How can you think anything else when you see the innocence of young children? Of course, people are born with different, sometimes difficult, personalities. But fundamental optimism about human nature has always been a driving...

By Kamila E. Sip and David Carmel from Scientific American "By saying “I do”, newlyweds promise to love and cherish each other no matter what happens for the rest of their lives; hardly anybody makes this promise intending to break it. But imagine making a promise when in fact, you know you would...

By Rachel Rettner from msnbc . Other people's good deeds inspire the rest of us, study suggests. "The warm and fuzzy feelings you may experience after watching others perform virtuous deeds may in turn lead you to act altruistically as well, according to a new study based on the results of two...

by Daniel Mendelsohn for The New Yorker "Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its...

By Anindita N. Balslev from The Global Spiral. "When scholars approach a vital human emotion and shared value like compassion, they are confronted with a range of questions. First, how do we understand compassion? How has it been analyzed and interpreted in the cognitive discourses that are associated...

From The Economist "What do the following have in common: the bar code, congestion charging, the cervical Pap smear and the internet? All emerged from work done at America’s pre-eminent research universities. The central contention of Jonathan Cole’s book is that these mighty institutions are “creative...

by Evan Lerner from Seed Magazine "Today, down in the descriptively named Research Triangle in North Carolina, more than 250 scientists, journalists, bloggers, programmers, and multi-hyphenated combinations thereof are planning the future of science communication on the web. (Practicing what it...

Interview by Nathan Gardels for New Perspectives Quarterly Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and essayist who died in 2004, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Just after the publication of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry and his memoir, Road-side Dog...

By Tysan Lerner from The Epoch Times. "When Benjamin Franklin was 20 years old he began documenting when he would fail to behave according to the standard he had set for himself. These standards were comprised of 13 virtues. He carried out the practice of documenting his behavior for the rest of...