archive

Out of hand

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (UCL), Ed Diener (Illinois), Louis Tay (Purdue), and Cody Xuereb (LSE): The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being. It's dismissed out of hand by some as the preserve of "geeks" with latex swords, but those who love live-action role-play describe it as a form of interactive storytelling, writes Peter Ray Allison. Charles Seife writes an open letter to his former NSA colleagues: Mathematicians, why are you not speaking out? The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, the sequel to The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, “sees the reunion of brilliant philosopher Slavoj Zizek with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, now using their inventive interpretation of moving pictures to examine ideology — the collective fantasies that shape our beliefs and practices”. What does the G20 actually do? Susan Harris Rimmer explains. Critics think Obama has boxed himself in and surrendered executive-branch power to Congress — they’re in for a big surprise. Eric Posner on how Obama is only making his war powers mightier. Molly’s pretty big with the kids these days — so what exactly is all the fuss about? Legal debates over the "big data" revolution currently focus on the risks of inclusion — the privacy and civil liberties consequences of being swept up in big data's net — Jonas Lerman takes a different approach, focusing on the risks of exclusion: the threats big data poses to those whom it overlooks. How did Syria's hacker army suddenly get so good?