Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, was named Piyush by his Indian immigrant parents and raised as a Hindu. His conversion to Christianity, he told an interviewer from Christianity Today, took seven years. It began when his grandfather died and he turned to books for insights into the mysteries of life and death—first the Bible, then the writings of…
Ever go to bed with the name of someone or something on the tip of your tongue? You just can’t quite remember it. Then you wake up the next morning, and bang! Mystery solved. This often happens to me after I watch an old movie on TCM, the Turner Classic Movies cable station. I’ll recognize an actor from the 1930s,…
It was with me at the beginning, almost before I was here myself. It will be there at the end, gently easing me closer to the secrets of the universe. It provides escape from daily stress. It makes all my problems disappear, at least for a little while. It helped me grow into what I am today. It is sleep.…
We tend to think of our internal organs as specialists, highly refined machines that work 24/7 at specific tasks. The one exception is the brain: the ultimate supercomputer that can make a multitude of decisions and manage our behavior with incredible speed and efficiency. Now research shows that the brain doesn’t have a monopoly on intelligence. The heart and stomach,…
You want something—maybe it’s a car, a job, a dream vacation, the end of an illness, the start of a relationship, Whatever it is, you set your sights on it and then…as the Stones so eloquently said, “You can’t always get what you want.” But will you be satisfied to only get what you need? In a life where free…
Intelligence used to provide a vital survival advantage, making smart genes more likely to be passed on to the next generation. But that era is long gone, thanks to today’s computers and other devices that override various human weaknesses. Today, evolution in general would seem to be, well…out of date. But it turns out that cultural changes may be able…
