Down the road, the most controversial approach to neuroenhancement could be a way not of stimulating the brain but of reengineering it.
Creating groups is easy - but to make them meaningful and lasting, you have to give them a common identity that not only unites them but shows them why they are unique.
Once fraternities became tied to power and leadership, the powerful and would-be-leaders wanted to join.
Gender perception can be a pernicious thing: Where a lack of warmth passes in a male, in a woman, it's deadly.
It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.
The goals of literature are multifold, but creating nice, positive protagonists that you'd want to grab drinks with or invite home to mom can hardly be considered one of them.
Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist.
If we rush too quickly to be scientific, to begin our experiment or catch our criminal as soon as possible, we risk never getting to the answer at all.
Cloud Atlas' is but one of a long list of titles deemed unfilmable, by author and movie moguls alike, until it was, well, filmed.
There will be great books. There will be great films. Sometimes, if we are lucky, the two will intersect.
I can understand pulling a book whose contents have been questioned - after all, false information has a way of sticking in your brain and seeming true when you go to retrieve it years later.
An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces.
For as long as writers have written, they've had second thoughts about their work.
Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.
At the end, we can embrace and love whatever we want of an author's work. But we also can't ignore a writer's express wish just because we don't happen to agree with it.
In the world of speeches and orations, especially historical ones, the persistent misquotation is understandable. You hear a speech. You misremember or mishear a line as something more colorful than it was.
The more fluent the experience of reading a quote - or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind--the less likely we are to question the actual quotation.
To a child, 'The Little Prince' is the story of a boy who falls from the sky, meets lots of funny people on his travels, and then returns to his star. But take a closer look and you find as clear a commentary on everything that's wrong with modern life - and what can be done to fix it - as you would in the most biting social satire.
Researchers have always tried to use psychology for predictive ends: Can what we already know about a person tell us how she will behave in a given situation? The results of these endeavors have been mixed.
Finding the one right candidate in a group is hard, and companies don't have much time to figure out exactly which questions can help them tell similar-seeming candidates apart.
