Reading Time: 4 minutes A recently shipwrecked migrant vessel at Pylos and a lost submersible near wreckage from the Titanic create an easy contrast for reflecting on injustice. But are we missing the larger lesson?
earthquake of perspective
Posted inCulture
Accepting the reality of a less literate age
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s hard to deny, and harder to accept, that reading and writing are in massive decline. But pull back for a wider view and the written word can be seen as a short-term innovation— and our current trend as a return to our oldest medium.
Posted inIdentity
Millennials: your liberal atheist elders
Reading Time: 5 minutes Millennials are defying long-established patterns by getting older without becoming more religious or voting more conservative. It’s an unpleasant surprise for the American religious right.
Posted inHealth
Why anti-vaxxers get in more car crashes
Reading Time: 4 minutes People who reject the COVID vaccine also get in more traffic accidents than vaccinated people. What explains the link between these seemingly unrelated events?
Posted inHealth
Living and teaching in an unruly body
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m not disabled. Not yet. If I had to state it succinctly without referencing any diagnoses: my body is punitively fine-tuned—which doesn’t work well in academia, or anywhere else.
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
The deathbed perspective
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s easy to forget that life is temporary. How would you live differently with that knowledge in front of you?
Posted inThe Future
Could the rise of the nonreligious defuse the population bomb?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Fifty-four years ago, in 1968, American biologist Paul Ehrlich warned that a human “population bomb” threatened global catastrophe. The world’s population at the time was 3.54 billion.
On November 15, 2022, the UN estimate of Earth’s human population flew past eight billion.
Religious beliefs and practices are a major part of the problem. Increasing secularism can only help.
Posted inFilm/TV
When capitalism steals the face of your favorite artist
Reading Time: 7 minutes A neat trick: From Star Wars to Watchmen to Disco Elysium, stories with strong anti-capitalist messages are increasingly co-opted and turned into the very capitalist sausage they once attacked.
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Dying out loud
Reading Time: 3 minutes A few weeks ago I played with an octopus. It was not in some water park or controlled aquarium. It was in the wild. It was in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii. It was quite a moment. I’m all about the moments, because I feel like that’s really all we have. You […]
Posted inThe Color of Disbelief
It’s secularism, stupid: Why Latino voters aren’t abandoning the Democratic Party
Reading Time: 6 minutes Throughout the 2022 midterm election cycle, there have been countless stories about Latinos abandoning the Democratic Party. A closer examination of the polls and questions around Latino religiosity tells a different story, one rooted in the most dramatic development in Latino politics: the rise of secularism.