But human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly ...

"People are generally stupid," I remember making this impulsive remark in one of my high school classes and then noticing the flat look on the teacher's face. On the bus home, I thought about it. What ...

“There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have great admiration for stupidity” – the sentiment behind Oscar Wilde’s bonmot is strangely fashionable these days. Dozens ...

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the gym, exercising and musing about an upcoming column, when one of the kids from the front desk ran up to me. “Did you put a lock on a locker?” he asked. I said that ...

We spend so much time talking about intelligence, pondering what makes someone smart. But what about the other side of that coin? Especially in an Internet-driven world, it is worth taking a few ...

The latest technology can prove decisive in war. Think of the atomic bomb in World War II. Or the stirrup in the Mongol conquest of Europe and the Middle East. More recently, after the two sides had ...

If you spend any time around other people, you already know that sometimes people can act rather foolishly. Whether by accident or deliberately, the fact that it sometimes happens still stands. Today, ...