How chewing gum makes you smarter.***Why are you laughing? Uncovering the cognitive science of humor.***Nostalgic for your old Walkman? The Audman will lovingly encase your iPhone in a retro case with buttons and everything. It also includes an app that makes your phone screen look like a ...

GQ compiled a list of the windbags who qualify as the 25 least influential people alive. Among the useless: Hosni Mubarak, Harrison Ford, Amy Chua, and Michele Bachmann’s husband Marcus. (Oh, and the guy pictured above.)***The coolest artists’ retreats in the world: the Fogo Island ...

Perhaps, like me, you’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving this year with a full heart. Likely you know someone who has lost their job, someone who is battling disease, someone whose plate of worries has been heaped full. Perhaps that person is a friend of a friend, a close loved one, or yourself. ...

Michelle Obama champions youth poet ambassador program.***What they expect when you’re expecting: tube tops silk-screened with the names of heavy metal bands and Daisy Duke jean shorts. ***100 CEOs refuse to give any more campaign donations until lawmakers end partisan gridlock.   ***11 ...

Some of the best stuff from the Twitter feeds we follow...The Nation (@thenation): Robert Reich eviscerates the Supercommittee's skewed priorities, draws a cartoon. See more at The NationMother Jones (@MotherJones)Chart of the Day: How Not to Create Jobs mojo.ly/vy6C5eChuck Marr of CBPP notes ...

After more than thirty years as a media critic, Utne Reader contributor Norman Solomon is running for Congress. Dennis Bernstein at The Progressive spoke to Solomon about this career change. “For more than forty years, I’ve been writing to change the system; now I’m running to change ...

“The ocean’s power is so big,” writes The Smart Set’s Stefany Anne Goldberg, “that it not only generates our worst disasters, it recycles our tragedies for later consideration, just when the whole fuss finally starts to die down.”***What is more expensive: to send a criminal to ...

When you start up an opinion blog, you voluntarily expose yourself to the world. If you also happen to be a woman, writes Helen Lewis-Hasteley at New Statesman (Nov. 3, 2011), you “open the front door to a chorus of commenters howling at you about your opinions, your name, your appearance, ...

Why did Congress reaffirm our bland, meaningless national motto?***If you’re having trouble finding the right words to say something colossally stupid, you can always lean on The Week’s “Bad Opinion Generator.”***Forget China: the $10 trillion global black market is the world’s ...

“Whats 10 inches and gets girls to have sex with me? my knife.”“You know she’s playing hard to get when she trys to break out of your van.”These sayings exist as fan pages on Facebook, with 60 people liking the former and 921 liking the latter. They’re just two among many rape ...