The story of technology is the story of continual disruption and displacement. New systems and processes send some skills into obsolescence, opening the way for new skills and workflows. Generative AI has triggered the latest "de-skilling." But chatbot technology isn't only transforming jobs and shifting our relationship with information itself. It is also inviting us to relinquish our cognitive independence and bring about a sort of dispossession that is unprecedented.
Being right is a victory for the ego. Being connected is a truth of the soul. We are always connected-all that fluctuates is our awareness of that reality. But in being right, we not only forget that truth, but we translate the pain of disconnection into the cost of our struggle. Of course things are hard-because the other side makes it that way. This is true whether it's our political enemy or viewing our partner as the enemy.
Global Workspace Theory is among the most influential scientific theories of consciousness. Its central claim is: You consciously experience something if and only if it's being broadly broadcast in a "global workspace" so that many parts of your mind can access it at once - speech, deliberate action, explicit reasoning, memory formation, and so on. Because the workspace has very limited capacity, only a few things can occupy it at any one moment.
I started thinking rationally. Unless magic is real, there isn't a god. Also, for everything good that happened, God was thanked, not freewill. But everything bad that happens, like an island for child sex trafficking, gets blamed on freewill.
Deepfakes probably are still best known for their bad uses. Just a couple of years after deepfakes hit the internet in 2017, the vast majority of deepfakes were pornographic, often depicting famous people doing things they hadn't actually been recorded doing. Later, deepfakes were being deployed for political destabilization, even as wartime disinformation tactics. For instance, not long after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a deepfake spread on social media, falsely depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as telling his people to surrender.
In 1968, just months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. looked out at burning American cities and gave an assessment of what he was really seeing. "In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard," he said. King wasn't excusing violence. He was diagnosing the problem as something even deeper than disagreement over politics or values. Beneath the unrest, he saw the pain of people who had been speaking for a very long time, and who felt that no one in power was listening.
Some time ago, a client came to me facing what seemed like a thousand decisions: where to live, which job to take, whom to love. As we worked together, those many paths narrowed to one persistent question: Am I loving the right person? Or, more precisely: Do I want to love this man, even if facts suggest I take other routes?
Most of us like to believe we're too sophisticated to confuse money with purpose. Yet a surprising number of people, especially younger generations, slip into that trap without ever consciously choosing it. The idea that "my purpose is to make money" has become so pervasive that it rarely gets questioned. It's simple, it's measurable, and on the surface, it makes sense.
when referring to God - often the deity described in the Bible - as "He." Whether it's Alanis Morissette's iconic portrayal of God in the 1999 comedy " Dogma" or Ariana Grande's titular declaration in her 2018 track " God is a Woman," the effect is the same: a mixture of irreverence and empowerment. It dovetails, moreover, with a ubiquitous political slogan: " The future is female."
Last year, during the Central APA, I was teaching at an institution that no longer had a philosophy major. In my Modern Philosophy class we had the unique opportunity to join a public session at the APA. None of these students could be philosophy majors at this institution even if they wanted. Yet, thanks to the 2+1 program, they could participate in the ISEE public panel on Indigenous Environmental Ethics.
On his visit to Turkey and Lebanon between Nov. 27 and Dec. 2, 2025, Pope Leo XIV met with political and religious leaders, celebrated Mass and visited historical sites. The trip marked the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which resolved core doctrinal differences, with the aim of advancing Christian unity at the time. The Vatican framed the visit to the two Muslim-majority countries as a gesture of interreligious dialogue, as well as support for local minority Christian communities.
Exclusion and ridicule are especially painful experiences of indignity. Violations of dignity, whether obvious and intended, or subtle and unintentional, are emotional injuries that evoke feelings of shame and anger, defensiveness and withdrawal, and, often, a need to retaliate in some form. Hicks notes that the pain caused by injuries to our dignity is equivalent to physical pain and processed in the same areas of the brain.
There is a meme that circulates every holiday season, an image of a sign in a restaurant window. "The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people," it says. "We do not completely understand your dietary customs ... but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insists you eat our food on Christmas."
In her 1951 landmark study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt characterized statelessness as "the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history," one which has much to do with explaining the book's titular subject. Roughly a century after the post-World War I period to which Arendt was referring, mass migration and displacement are again leading to ominous political developments. The Trump administration's recent actions on immigration provide a clear case in point.
Consider a common scenario. Someone's history slowly reveals itself: a past marked by addiction, by deception, by relationships destroyed through the same behaviors now emerging in your direction. You discover that the way they treat you mirrors how they treated others before: the lying, the sneaking, the betrayals they swore were behind them. The addiction they claimed to have conquered resurfaces in different substances, different compulsions, while they remain in denial about what anyone watching from outside could plainly see.
It's a common misconception (no pun intended) that "Immaculate Conception" refers to the Roman Catholic teaching that the Virgin Mary conceived Jesus without having sex. But that belief is known as the Virgin Birth of Jesus. "The Virgin Birth refers to Jesus being born of a woman who was a virgin," the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, told HuffPost. "His birth is miraculous because Mary conceived a child without having sexual relations with a man."
A big one for me is the ability to let others be wrong. It's not up to any of us to tutor others in the ways of righteousness. That doesn't mean never challenging anyone, but rather not getting emotionally invested in changing their mind. This is especially relevant in our political climate, but also it's important for one's own peace.
'More songs about Buildings and Food' was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don't sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce's 1976 hit 'Car Wash' are the exception.
Renowned Iranian poet Ahmad Shamloo says that pain is fundamental to human existence - not merely an incidental experience, but its very starting point. Pain is the price of consciousness, freedom, and choice itself. Reflecting on this insight, I recognized a profound yet rarely acknowledged truth: every choice we make inherently involves regret, so there are no completely pain-free paths in life.
Our new research, forthcoming in the academic journal PNAS Nexus, a flagship peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests this "heart versus head" argument is too simple. Empathy and reasoning aren't rivals-they work together. Each one on its own predicts more generous, far-reaching acts of assistance. And when they operate side by side, people tend to help in the fairest ways-not favoring some over others-and in ways that touch the most lives.
As disputes rage on over religion's place in public schools, the Ten Commandments have become a focal point. At least a dozen states have considered proposals that would require the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, with Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas mandating their display in 2024 or 2025. Challenges led to all three laws being at least partially blocked.
In Troels Carlsen's exhibition Alt flyder - Everything flows - nothing is permanent, and everything is connected. Flora and fauna are quite literally intertwined in Carlsen's large tableaus, often painted with acrylics on intricately collaged archival material sourced from antiquarian bookstores. Dynamic, dancing skeletons with bodies of radiant green springy stems and lush leaves sprout blackberries and pink wildflowers, surrounded by bumblebees. Bodies, bees, flowers and fruit are interdependent in an ancient biological choreography.
