Brainstorm

Brainstorm readers: We’re excited to call your attention to The Conversation, The Chronicle’s new home for opinion and ideas online. Building on Brainstorm and Innovations, it includes many of the regular contributors you have seen over the years and offers new ones as well.

Laurie Fendrich on whales, horses, pigs, and artists.

Carl Elliott concludes his Q&A on the ethics of academic bioethicists working for the pharmaceutical industry.

Old habits die hard, Laurie Fendrich writes, even when they’re destroying the planet.

Institutional history and inertia, perhaps, Michael Ruse speculates.

Do bioethicists make pharmaceutical companies more ethical?

Laurie Essig wishes politics could be kept out of her extended family’s meals. But some things you just have to swallow.

Yes, writes Kevin Carey, a certain ideal interactive kind of education is inimitable on the Web. But that ideal is not the kind of education that pays the bills, nor has it ever been.

Science is not a list of things we know, but rather a way of investigating what we don’t, writes David Barash.

Want a better year? Then vigorously shape it to your liking and your betterment, advises Gina Barreca.