AI is getting scarily good
Reading Time: 7 minutes Technological advances have made it possible for computers to hold conversations, perform surgery, create art, and more. What room is left for humans?
The night I called Code Lavender
July 1995. It was my first night of internship, the next step after medical school. I’d already admitted a half dozen patients to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit from the emergency room under the watch of a third-year resident. The CCU was the scariest first-night internship assignment there was.
The fellowship of the living
As humanists, we should completely reject age as an artificial segregation of humanity. A deep future view can help.
10 eye-opening secular books for a new perspective
Reading Time: 5 minutes Our world, and our minds, are always changing. Secular people often claim to be freethinkers, which is great. But part of being a freethinker is keeping your mind open to new ideas, new stories, and new perspectives. The good part is that the solution is remarkably simple: re
Study: How most of the 5 billion would die in a US/Russia nuclear exchange
Reading Time: 2 minutes A new study found that a nuclear war between the US and Russia could be the worst catastrophe in world history. But most people wouldn’t die from the exchange itself; 5 billion would perish from the hunger that follows. The study, published in Nature, found that the soot prod
Maybe religion isn’t dying, but it’s definitely not well
Reading Time: 6 minutes In their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Byron R. Johnson and Jeff Levin, referring to a paper they recently published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion (IJRR), argue that religiosity is not declining in the US but rather, “Americans are becoming more
‘The Great Replacement’: How New Atheists legitimized and spread a white nationalist conspiracy theory
Reading Time: 17 minutes A string of deadly far-right attacks across the globe in the past decade or so had one thing in common: a white nationalist conspiracy theory known as The Great Replacement. From Utoya, Norway in 2011 to the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, El Paso, Texas and Chri
What might 100,000 more years of evolution do for the future of morality?
Reading Time: 2 minutes It was a bawdy planet for hundreds of millions of years; the whole of it reeked of sex without a whiff of morals in the air. Then, rather late in the day, a mere several thousand years ago, humans began offering moral codes recommending ‘licit’ sexual expression. But humans f
The middle of history
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.
Mother-daughter stories are easy. You just have to break the universe
Reading Time: 5 minutes More than ever before, adult children are breaking ties with their parents. Shifting cultural norms and expectations, coupled with increased individualism and awareness of mental health concepts, are prompting children in their 30s to go “limited contact/no contact” with pare
Mass killings: Why we need to see the murdered innocents
Reading Time: 7 minutes For several decades beginning in the 1950s, driver education classes in the United States included screenings of “shock films”—documentary shorts, narrated in police drama style, created to bring the reality of high-speed collisions home to young drivers. Names like Highway o
Lack of trust is the universal acid
Reading Time: 4 minutes Our greatest accomplishments sprang from an era of trust and cooperation. Without trust, all our institutions crumble.
