Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, was named Piyush by his Indian immigrant parents and raised as a Hindu. His conversion to Christianity, he told an interviewer from Christianity Today, took seven years. It began when his grandfather died and he turned to books for insights into the mysteries of life and death—first the Bible, then the writings of…
Nelson Mandela enjoyed such a long twilight that it’s easy to forget what a threatening figure he once cut—not just in South Africa but in the United States, where he was routinely condemned as a Communist terrorist. In 1985 William F. Buckley wrote: “where Mandela belongs…is precisely where he is: in jail.” Mandela made no bones about being a revolutionary;…
Last winter, three developers at a weekend hackathon in Vancouver presented their first-person videogame “Auti-sim,” designed to simulate the experience of sensory overload as it’s experienced by an autistic child. In their one-minute prototype (below), the player’s point of view lurches around a playground. The visual field is filled with undifferentiated faces and unfocused images; the colors are supersaturated and the…
If the heart is a pump, the liver is a strainer, and the stomach is a composter, then is it fair to say that the brain is a computer? Neurobiology, wrote Jerry Coyne, a professor of biology at the University of Chicago, tells us that “our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes…
Obsessed as they are with weights, measures, and other materialistic minutiae, scientists, we are often told, miss the mark when it comes to discerning the intangible values that give life its true meaning—and are sometimes an active force for evil. “We murder to dissect,” the poet Wordsworth said. Left to their own devices, scientists build super-weapons or harvest embryos for…
Krishna Pendyala was one of a talented and lucky handful of Indian students to matriculate at the Indian Institute of Technology. An IIT degree was a ticket to a high-status, top-paying job—and it opened the door to emigration to the United States, where there were even more possibilities. At age 18, his whole life was laid out before him…
Part of the reason I am troubled by conspiracy theories is because they are so reductive. They take a complex, explosive, and almost always tragic event (otherwise, no one would be paying any attention to it) and cram it into a template that “proves” it was a premeditated crime, coldly committed by members of a group that has a secret…
Odi et amo: I hate and I love, wrote the poet Catullus. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior: I don’t know why, but I feel it happening and it tortures me. Last month, I wrote about the brain’s so-called “hate circuit,” which isn’t a switch that turns hate on or off, but a set of brain structures that are activated…
