Should Christmas trees be banned in tax-funded public spaces?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Although I’m a committed nontheist and ardent church-state separationist, I’m not inflexible about it. Which is to say I see no good reason to oppose Christmas trees, for example, in public, tax-supported spaces. It’s been a centuries-long American civic tradition to erect Ch
‘Spare’: Prince Harry’s ‘todger’ a distraction in memoir of betrayal
Reading Time: 5 minutes Among many juicy tidbits in British royal Prince Harry’s newly released tell-all memoir, Spare, is his recollection of treating his frost-bit penis, suffered during a 2011 Antarctic expedition, using cream his late mother used on her lips. Wrote Daily Beast senior editor Davi
The EU is cracking down on big-tech privacy theft. Why not the US?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Although most of us never read the endless expanses of fine print in social-media-user “terms of service” agreements, the European Union’s (EU) “big-tech” regulators do. These agreements and the corporate abuses they accommodate can have far-reaching negative effects on socie
What I found in that dusty shop in Arabia in 1985 changed everything
Reading Time: 5 minutes It was summer 1985, and I found myself at scorching midday deep in the dry-as-dead-bones central marketplace, the souk, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was hunting for, of all improbable things at that time, a “personal computer” (PC). Ever since a fellow American expatriate demon
Surprise! Empty pews are nonpartisan
Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s been common knowledge since the coronavirus pandemic arrived in America several years ago that empty pews have sharply increased, as churches, often controversially, closed their doors to protect congregants from spread of the deadly disease among their flocks. But in re
The United States has an atonement problem
Reading Time: 6 minutes Throughout our history, but particularly since 2016, when Donald Trump first rode down that ill-fated escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy, it has grown ever clearer that Americans have a serious problem with atonement. We tend to run hellbent away
Did Krakatoa’s eruption turn Indonesia Muslim?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Starting at 11:05 p.m. on October 11, 2002, three terrorist bombs detonated in quick succession on the picturesque Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, mostly Western tourists, in the teeming bar district. Historians said it had been a very long time coming—119 year
A colonoscopy probably saved my life—but not from colorectal cancer
Reading Time: 5 minutes If reports about a new European study that questions the effectiveness of colonoscopies are causing you to question whether you should get one, don’t let them. I make this recommendation due to my own life-changing personal experience with that undignified cancer-detecting pr
NASA’s Artemis: A big step in sending humans to Mars
Reading Time: 5 minutes When NASA’s ambitious Artemis I project rocket—the agency’s most powerful launch vehicle ever—blasted into space from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on November 16, scarcely more than a century ago automobiles and airplanes were still in their cradles. In a historical blink o
On Margaret Mead and healed thigh bones: Not all compelling stories are true
Reading Time: 7 minutes I’ve loved Margaret Mead ever since first reading her classic Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. I read it more than 50 years ago as a clueless college sophomore. There was something seductive about this diminutive, head
Low-income workers get a little raise! Big whoop.
Reading Time: 4 minutes We’re all, at least to some degree, deluded. Whether we believe fervently in deities that—let’s be honest—seem not to exist anywhere. Whether we believe someone we love deeply loves us back when they actually don’t. Or whether we believe we understand what being poor really m
LGBTQ happiness booming in … Bhutan?
Reading Time: 4 minutes The tiny, landlocked Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan would hardly seem a likely haven for an LGBTQ revolution. After all, this mountainous Asian country of fewer than a million inhabitants is far more famous for its arch-conservative Buddhist traditionalism and quaint “Gross Nati