This is how fundamental discoveries — aka, “useless knowledge” — are usually made: not so much by hunting for something specific, but by wandering with an interested eye amid the unknown. It’s also ...

IN conversation with a learned friend lately, our talk ran on various definitions of culture, and on the fact that for one reason or another we found them all unsatisfactory. This led us to ponder the ...

Discouraged by a steady decline in the number of U. S. students studying languages, and by the racial and religious discriminations against teachers in other lands —which they deplored*—2,500 members ...

In October 1939, as Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were plunging the world into war, an American educational reformer named Abraham Flexner published an essay in Harper’s Magazine under the marvelous ...

The address for the Institute for Advanced Study is 1 Einstein Drive, named after undoubtedly the most famous scientist to work here. The campus lies amid sprawling green meadows, oak trees and a ...

A new water cooler discussion went viral on Twitter this week, with a post from the Super Pod Saga prompting everyone and their dog to share "useless video game knowledge" which is also really cool ...

Last month, one simple question took the Internet by storm: It elicited all kinds of responses, but there wasn't much in the way of... Whipped cream battles, the 'Wizard' and a pro wrestling dad close ...

Each day, I walk down the path of blue-lit internet highways, through Instagram rabbit holes to nowhere, across Wikipedia pages I don’t remember why I was scanning, my face painted a clinical white by ...