editor's pick
Climbing the Kardashev ladder: How civilization survives
The power to control ever-greater amounts of energy is a hallmark of civilization’s progress, and humanity is poised to take the next big step.
Could the rise of the nonreligious defuse the population bomb?
The UN estimate of Earth’s human population has flown past eight billion. Can less religion slow the explosion?
‘Cementing bias in a flower-scented maze’: A.I. and the eternal digital footprint
Artificial intelligence is big business, and it’s not going away.
The saved and the damned of Proxima Centauri B
How might Christianity work intelligent alien life into their worldview? Did everyone get a Jesus?
AI: The newest squirrel distracting evangelicals from their own decline
Evangelicals have expressed both dread regarding AI’s popularity and power, and excitement about its potential to turn around their decades-long decline.
On ‘tomorrow sorrow’: How we grieve the future today
Humans have the capacity to grieve the world ahead, knowing how much is going wrong today. But tomorrow sorrow can make us stronger actors.
Gen Z views are rapidly splitting in half by gender—and the gap is not small
Today’s young people are going through a significant shift. Young women appeared to be more concerned with and aligned to progressive values and issues, while young men are moving in a more conservative direction.
What do trees say to each other?
The more we look, the more intelligence we find in nature. Even trees are capable of communicating, sharing resources, and responding to their environment.
Our AI future: What AI can and (probably) can’t do
AI has genuine potential both to liberate humans from toil, or to allow greed and bias to run wild.
Z: The least religious generation ever
In an analysis that reads like porn for secularists, Daniel Cox details the degrees to which Gen Z is markedly more secular than any previous generational cohort.
Why AI isn’t an oracle of truth
Reading Time: 5 minutes Big Tech companies eager to find the next big thing have latched onto AI chatbots—but they’re racing ahead of what the tech can actually do.
Our secular struggle with medically assisted dying
Reading Time: 14 minutes Suffering from chronic pain, a friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news. I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devast