editor's pick

M L Clark
Members Public

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

M L Clark
Members Public

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

M L Clark
Members Public

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

Adam Lee
Members Public

Are AI art programs ripping off human artists?

Reading Time: 5 minutes Artists erupted in protest when they learned that AI art engines like Stable Diffusion were trained on their copyrighted works. This revelation has ignited a debate about the meaning of fair use.

M L Clark
Members Public

The Scientist Rebellion: What will it take to get the world’s attention?

Reading Time: 8 minutes The Scientist Rebellion calls for more people “on the inside” to take up the struggle against government inaction. But where does the movement fit into broader climate change activism, and is its degrowth message enough?

Georgia Michelman
Members Public

A dry run to save the planet: NASA DART probe closing in on asteroid impact

Reading Time: 6 minutes NASA’s DART spacecraft will crash into an asteroid on September 26, the first real-life test of planetary defense techniques.

Georgia Michelman
Members Public

Entropy, time, and the arrow of adolescence

Is there an inherent link between entropy and the momentum of time?

Dr. Eve Makoff
Members Public

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.

Ryan Cragun
Members Public

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

Eiynah
Members Public

‘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

Adam Lee
Members Public

The middle of history

Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.

Adam Lee
Members Public

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.