From New Scientist, a look at how chaos drives the brain. Insect colonies offer insight into the mysterious conversations of neurons, illuminating how billions of individual brain cells work in concert to make a single decision. Understanding human thought processes puts a different spin on everything from global financial meltdowns to fighter pilot errors. Did an ice age boost human brain size? Your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world? Your brain on the Internet: What does the ubiquitous availability of digital text mean for the human brain as it processes ever-increasingly amounts of information? The Joys of Brain Scrubbing: The advantages of memory deletion in a collectively omniscient world. Your brain in drive: What happens when an older driver takes the wheel — and what we all can learn from it. A review of The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnik (and more and more and more and more and more and more). Stunning discoveries about how babies and children develop can help answer questions about deeply human concepts such as morality, identity and consciousness. Dan and Chip Heath on why your gut is more ethical than your brain.

The Cowboys of Kabul: How a pair of bankrupt Texas grandparents cashed in on Afghanistan's contracting bonanza. An interview with Jared Diamond on unsustainable lifestyles, the effects of geography on a society's development and the recent shock to Anglo-Saxon capitalism. From The Common Review, Tom McBride on the day he almost saved the humanities. The shame of academe and fascism, then and now: College presidents didn't rally against the Nazis, but maybe they'll do better with Iran. Ben Stein on being expelled from The New York Times. Andrew Klavan on how Wordsworth’s corpus reflects the growth of a conservative’s mind. In this Calvinist country, if you can’t get laid for 20 years, you’re a monumental loser and it’s all your fault. Inside story on town hall riots: Right-wing shock troops do Corporate America's dirty work. Fifty ways to kill recovery: How the states are sabotaging the stimulus. So it seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression after all — what saved us? From FT, economists shuffle the deckchairs: What matters is whether economists can identify significant turning points and systemic failures in good time — they cannot; and statistics are essential to understanding the world, but statisticians get little credit — bean-counters of the world, unite!

From The Village Voice, a review of The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino; and a review of David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, Brian Fies's Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, and more comics galore. I Saw You: Comics Inspired By Real Life Missed Connections is an interesting and important marker both in comics history as well as our larger cultural history. From Ode, true-life superheroes, now in comic books: Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama and Mahatma Gandhi, Anne Frank and Nelson Mandela; and comic book artist Suleiman Bakhit looks for stories and role models that will empower and inspire a new generation of comic book readers in the Middle East. More than Super: Searching for Christ in a comic book culture. From PopMatters, a look at the rise in popularity of the comics convention and the pop-cultural changes conventions have brought to comics. Andrew Terjesen on why Watchmen’s Dr Manhattan is a Stoic sage for our times. Karin L. Kross reviews Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Three new graphic novels display the ambition behind an evolving format. Is an affection for graphic novels by anyone over 25 simply the literary equivalent of buying a sports car or getting a face lift?

From Daedalus, a special issue on the humanities, including Richard Franks (John Nuveen): The Power of the Humanities and a Challenge to Humanists; Don Michael Randel (Mellon Foundation): The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society; Franklin Oakley (Williams): The Humanities in Liberal Arts Colleges; Michael Wood (Princeton): A World Without Literature?; Edward Ayers (Richmond): Where the Humanities Live; Caroline Bynum (IAS): Perspectives, Connections and Objects: What's Happening in History Now?; Anthony Grafton (Princeton): Apocalypse in the Stacks? The Research Library in the Age of Google; Kathleen Woodward (Washington): The Future of the Humanities; and Harriet Zuckerman (Columbia) and Ronald Ehrenberg (Cornell): Recent Trends in Funding for the Academic Humanities and Their Implications; and a special issue on what it means to be human, including Hilary Rose (Bradford) and Steven Rose (Open): The Changing Face of Human Nature; Michael Gazzaniga (UCSB): Humans: The Party Animal; Robert Pippin (Chicago): Natural and Normative; Ian Hacking (Toronto): Humans, Aliens and Autism; Harriet Ritvo (MIT): Humans and Humanists; and Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton): Experimental Moral Psychology.