culture
Guns and religion: The nexus of the AR-15’s obscene popularity
Reading Time: 5 minutes Turns out Barack Obama was right about guns and religion. During his successful 2008 presidential campaign, he alluded to white, blue-collar manufacturing workers in America who were terribly incensed that their well-paying jobs and comfortable lives had vaporized in globaliz
You thought HAL was creepy? Meet Sydney
Reading Time: 4 minutes We’ve already seen what havoc technology-exploiting evil operators can wreak on people and societies. More than 70 million presumably-sensible Americans voted in 2020 for a presidential candidate whose entire political message was—and continues to be—built on easily-shredded
Introducing LA’s newest secular youth group
Reading Time: 4 minutes When I was a teen, there is nothing I would have loved more than to be in a secular youth group. I wasn’t in a religious youth group, but from what I’ve heard, I didn’t miss much besides purity culture, bad Christian rock music, and suppressed teen hormones. But what if there
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
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
The longtermism that works—and the kind that doesn’t
Reading Time: 10 minutes In 2004, a tsunami and earthquake killed almost 230,000 people in 14 Indian Ocean countries. Many forms of relief then mouldered on the beaches—used clothes, high heel shoes, expired medicines—because “in-kind” donations are well known not to be effective forms of aid on a g
Eight billion of us: What does that mean?
Reading Time: 4 minutes November 15 is the UN’s estimated date for the eight billionth person to join the living human species. We might have hit that number a few days prior, or a few weeks ago. We might meet it tomorrow, or the day after. But some of we eight billion really like the feel of concre
Anonymity, privacy, transparency, integrity: Do we even know the future we want?
Reading Time: 8 minutes In the late 2000s, research blossomed around our use of online avatars. Did our videogame icons and social media profiles represent our actual selves, our ideal selves, or something else entirely? And did they have a reciprocal impact, a “Proteus effect” that transformed self
‘Free speech’ must be reformed before it destroys US democracy
Reading Time: 7 minutes The midterm elections are over. But, in a sense, it doesn’t matter—because the virulent, now-years-long epidemic afflicting American politics remains: cynical Republican mendacity, which is to say, purposeful lying and duplicity—spearheaded by former president Donald Trump. A
Vote for character, not shady characters
Reading Time: 3 minutes When you go to the polls to vote in Tuesday’s midterm election, if you didn’t vote early, keep one word in mind: character. The critical importance of that under-emphasized virtue to the health of the republic is eloquently underscored in a wise (as always) essay by David Fre
The overthinking humanist: Life in a world of eight billion
Reading Time: 13 minutes At 4 a.m. on Sunday, I just needed fifteen minutes to finish a news brief. Fifteen minutes, and I’d be ready to leave for a trip to a pueblo two hours away. Fifteen minutes, and I’d switch modes completely: from English to Spanish, from digital to analog, and from the high-m
Are fundamentalist religious schools retarding America’s future?
Reading Time: 5 minutes After firmly resisting New York state oversight for years, a private fundamentalist Hasidic Jewish academy in Long Island—one of the state’s largest schools—finally in 2019 agreed to give standardized state tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every single s