Highlights The Dalai Lama, other senior monks and Buddhist organizations in Asia and worldwide have emphasized that this pandemic calls for meditation, compassion, generosity and gratitude. There are three main schools of traditional Buddhism: Theravāda, practiced in most of Southeast Asia; Mahāyāna, the form most prevalent in East Asia; and Vajrayāna, commonly associated with Tibet and the Himalayan region. In […]

Highlights Reducing boredom requires that individuals solve the problems that produced it – not having sufficient activities that are both meaningful and optimally challenging. Other behaviors linked to greater susceptibility to boredom include increased alcohol intake and marijuana use. Boredom is also tied to unhealthy snacking and online pornography. One thing that makes such situations hard is that it can be […]

Highlights As a social historian of the medieval Islamic world, I think and write about the role of religion in daily life. Looking at how people thought about science and religion in the past can inform the contemporary world’s approach to COVID-19. The Jewish community also dealt with disease in other ways, and its holistic response to epidemics reveals […]

Highlights Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, followed those assurances with a guarantee of his own. The tooth fairy, he said, is not at risk of infection. We can only hypothesize about the economic and cultural forces that propelled the tooth fairy’s rise to stardom, but possible causes […]

Highlights It’s natural to attempt to comfort a kid who is feeling bewildered by the world. Most kids questions start as soon as they learn to speak, and they continue to think about them throughout childhood. “I like to be alone, but it’s different when you have to be alone. It makes me really appreciate my […]

Highlights According to utilitarian theory, if something were to happen to him, it would be a greater tragedy than if it happened to you, because he has more overall “utility” at stake. Hence the moral dilemmas. It’s all about the “greatest good” for all concerned. If you think the ethical thing is to maximize happiness, then […]

Highlights Apocalyptic ideas are an important theme in the Bible. The biblical Book of Revelation, for example, was written during a time of political upheaval when Christians were being persecuted. Much of what scholars know about the Jewish community that wrote and preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls, speaks to a people in the throes of […]

Highlights The bi-oceanic highway is only one visible sign of the Chaco’s agricultural boom: Extensive deforestation also scars the region. Roughly 14% of the Chaco forest was cut down between 2001 and 2014. The Mennonites of the Paraguayan Chaco who now number around 40,000, first arrived in the 1920s, escaping persecution from Stalin’s Russia by way of Canada. Mennonites continued arriving to Paraguay through […]

Highlights  In total, the vast network of camps hold 1 to 3 million Uighurs and Kazakhs who were sent there without trias. I soon discovered that in Urumqi, the rules varied according to neighborhood. City resident permit applications in Uighur-majority districts in Urumqi were under stricter regulations than those in Han-majority districts in Urumqi Regular home inspections were carried out by […]