Reading Time: 17 minutes We are awash in a wide, traumatizing range of material evidence and emotional truth. And in the throes of active conflict, emotional truth will win out every time.
media bias
Posted inSocial Media
CNN, Twitter, and the danger of signal-boosting
Reading Time: 3 minutes We are a species that struggles with group think, especially when confronted with the specter of popularity. If a famous or infamous person is in the news, it’s difficult not to pay attention. But there is a danger in allowing our attention to boost the signal for toxic people and ideas.
Posted inReligious News
Israel and the West: The global fight to outgrow national strife
Reading Time: 10 minutes On March 29, 2022, a gunman from near Jenin in the West Bank killed five people in a district of Tel Aviv. Two were Ukrainian nationals. One was a rabbi who died shielding his two-year-old. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah celebrated the killings, while the Palestinian National Authority joined other world […]
Posted inBiology
On brain cells, Pong, and a major problem with science journalism
Reading Time: 9 minutes Everything old is new again, in the world of mainstream reporting on scientific progress. That’s why you can be forgiven for déjà vu if you read this week about cells trained to interact in an environment mimicking the video game Pong. Wait a second, you might have told yourself: Didn’t we do this already? And […]
Posted inNews
What you need to know about Israel’s ‘Operation Breaking Dawn’
Reading Time: 2 minutes Over the weekend, Israeli airstrikes made news when Operation Breaking Dawn yielded death and property destruction in Gaza. As with every violent encounter in the region, differing accounts arose quickly, especially as the Palestinian civilian death count surged. The gamification of Middle Eastern peace through statistics is a common phenomenon for this decades-long crisis, but […]
Posted inHealth
What does fasting tell us about the state of scientific literacy?
Reading Time: 10 minutes In the last two episodes of Global Humanist Shoptalk, I explored the question of human agency in relation to food. In “The Humanist Chicken Egg”, I reflected on how product choices are shaped by the cultures we inhabit. In “The Humanist Carbon Footprint”, I considered the onus placed on consumers to interpret manipulative labeling. But […]
Posted inCritical thinking
What we learned when Fox News viewers were paid to watch CNN
Reading Time: 5 minutes Fox News isn’t just a news network or part of a larger media and entertainment umbrella. It is a lifestyle, a political worldview, a cult. This bubble or better, cage, is where Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are the sect leaders, manipulating and cajoling, provoking and controlling. And like with any cult, breaking out is […]
Posted inCulture
Addressing Palestinian suffering is hard, so the world plays word games
Reading Time: 6 minutes On February 1, 2022, Amnesty International released a report identifying the current situation in Israel and Palestine as “apartheid,” a term most commonly associated with South Africa’s political system of racial stratification until 1994. The full title goes further, calling the region’s state of affairs a “cruel system of domination and crime against humanity.” The […]
Posted inCritical thinking
Trend cycles, shmend cycles
Reading Time: 3 minutes Sometimes fortune favors the optimistic. It certainly did for me when one of my posts, “3 ways to combat the ´worst timeline´ blues,” brought out a commenter from a different slice of the political spectrum. In that post, I’d talked about the importance of overcoming our media fatigue, our sense of being dragged into inane […]
Posted inCritical thinking
3 ways to combat the ‘worst timeline’ blues
Reading Time: 5 minutes When I left Canada in 2018, I had a few reasons for my choice. One was economic. Another was no longer wishing to be part of the culture. Both are complicated, because plenty of people are trapped in economic hellscapes and cannot stand their culture, so what made me different? It’s the worst timeline for […]