- Blog
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Science is Working on a Cure
From Toothpaste for Dinner.
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That’s a Mighty High Dudgeon You’ve Got There
My wife asked me a question I at first dismissed when I told her about the previous post. I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. But I was telling her about the subject of the post, how I thought folks were wrong to perennially demand Sam Harris’s, or anyone else’s head on a platter when there…
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Sam Harris as a Trophy for Righteous Indignation
Here is Sam Harris’s great sin: In the context of many hot-button issues, the data leads him to a conclusion or approach that conflicts with one or another liberal orthodoxy. Liberals and seculars, not immune from the same faults as other humans over whom we feel superior, then commence with knee-jerk tantrums over Harris’s perceived…
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This Tumblr is a BFD
Whatever’s bothering you, however crappy you’re feeling, this Tumblr will make you feel at least a little bit better. Unless you’re a bad person. (Hat tip to Moglia.)
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Monty Python and the Scarcity of Irreverence
David Free in The Atlantic susses out what about Monty Python worked so well, and why we can’t have that today. It’s a pity that the word irreverent has lost its weight, so that it’s come to seem a mere synonym for cheeky. The Pythons were irreverent in the deepest sense. They had automatic respect…
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Internet Comments vs. Knowledge
Apparently, I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Internet comment sections. Neither does science. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: In an experiment . . . about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group…
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Comments. Boy, I Don’t Know.
I don’t generally like comments sections. Though I appreciate the ethos behind them, the notion that a blog is a place where folks can continue an article’s discussion beyond the written post, it rarely serves this purpose. Most of the time, in my experience as a reader and writer, comments are usually a bulliten board…
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Call Her an Asshole
Friend of the blog, and our whole little family, really, Meg Rhem, has advice for fathers of daughters (and I have a baby daughter). Dads, here’s a big one: do not ever, under any circumstance, refer to a woman as a whore or a slut. These words are violent, they are hateful, and their only…
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The History of Not-Reading
As one whose shelves were once littered with not-reading, I liked this. From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “The history of reading,” [Leah] Price says, “really has to encompass the history of not reading.” Anyone who has ever displayed a trophy volume on the coffee table knows that people do many things with books besides…
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Not All Deep Rifts Are Worth Diving Into
Kate Donovan, who is a real blessing to the interwebs, makes a great point about the Deep Rifts in the skepto-atheosphere, which I will then pour a teaspoon of cold water on. Kate writes: . . . if we’re going to be intellectually honest, we DO need to be arguing, critiquing, and otherwise speaking up…
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No, I Was Not Bullied into Not Being an Asshole
Oh, barf. Okay, so apparently that Thunderf00t guy (who I didn’t know anything about before the tumult he brought to FtB) has a video in which my name appears among a list of folks who contributed to the Skepchick series on rejecting anti-woman vitriol in the skepto-atheosphere, and asserts that the aforementioned folks were all…
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Making Tools to Fix Their Own Problems
Catherine Bracy on the tech sector’s obliviousness to genuine social causes and crises: The well-documented lack of diversity in the Valley would be comical if it wasn’t so harmful. It feels like, and often is, a bunch of Stanford guys making tools to fix their own problems. . . Barely any of them start from…
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The Constitution, On its Merits
When I read this piece by Louis Michael Seidman in the New York Times today, I wanted to throw a parade. Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to…
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An Unnecessary Hell
The Economist has a very worthwhile exploration of the enduring concept of Hell, but concludes in such a way as to baffle me. [Hell] should have been sunk long ago by the weight of its contradictions. But the key to its survival lies in the writings of St Augustine, who, of all people, ought to…
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Social Lasers of Cruelty
Jaron Lanier, a kind of web reverse-guru, perhaps the Anti-Shirky, talks to Smithsonian magazine about what he sees as the existential threat of Internet anonymity. “This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.” “Social lasers of…
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