From TED, Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for "practical wisdom" as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy; beyond the crisis, mindboggling science and the arrival of Homo evolutis; Jill Tarter on why the search for alien intelligence matters. Orlando Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia is the latest victim of the Kremlin’s attempts to rehabilitate the Soviet Union. With the birth of Nadya Suleman's octuplets, we confront the virtues of motherhood, the ethics of fertility clinics and the myths we still concoct about childless women's worth. What invasive species are trying to tell us: Walking snakeheads, carnivorous snails, and the superpredator from the reef — the invasion has begun. An interview with Martin Jacques, former editor of Marxism Today. After spending half a century in an enclosed order, the former abbess of Stanbrook has just taken a year out at art school in East London.  An excerpt from The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World by Richard Poplak. Financial types say pay caps might spur the smartest bankers to jump ship, but there are few places to go. No hay mujeres: An article on Latin American women and gender equality. To practising physicists, the great equations of physics might seem obvious, logical and trivial — but to their discoverers that was far from true.