Reading Time: 9 minutes The Respect for Marriage Act finally passed a its last vote. It’s now on its way to the president’s desk, where he’ll likely sign it into law on Tuesday. But it got there over the kicking and screaming of the Christian Right, a loose-knit assortment of hardline evangelical culture warriors and creepily-authoritarian hardline Catholics.
politics
Posted inCulture
Beyond Meathead and Archie: Can Braver Angels help bridge our current divide?
Reading Time: 4 minutes A national movement seeks to bring liberals, conservatives, and others together at the grassroots level—not to find a centrist compromise, but to find one another as citizens. Through workshops, debates, campus engagement, and more, Braver Angels helps Americans understand each other beyond stereotypes, form community alliances, and reduce the vitriol that poisons our civic culture.
Posted inEconomics
Bankman-Fried arrested—Now what’s to be done about Ponzinomics?
Reading Time: 5 minutes On December 12, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested at his apartment complex in the Albany resort in the Bahamas, after US prosecutors sent formal notice to local officials that they had filed criminal charges against him. The founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which Bankman-Fried announced was filing for bankruptcy on November 11, had been scheduled […]
Posted inPolitics
Nonreligious voters gave Democrats crucial wins. Will people notice?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Two trends in America are finally converging in a way that could become the dominant story of future elections: More Americans are leaving organized religion, and nonreligious voters are crucial to Democrats and their agenda. The Associated Press, which conducts a massive survey called the AP VoteCast, says that voters without any religious affiliation—roughly 22% […]
Posted inCulture
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 National Happiness” (GNH) index than for groundbreaking relaxations of longstanding socio-sexual mores. The GNH is […]
Posted inPolitics
The clear and present danger of a Senator Herschel Walker
Reading Time: 3 minutes As Georgia’s runoff election for the US Senate enters the early voting period, every reasonably-informed voter must know that Herschel Walker is a deeply flawed human being. But one of those flaws makes him an especially dangerous Senate candidate.
Posted inWar and Peace
Is America on the precipice of Civil War II?
Reading Time: 5 minutes The American Civil War is still far from over. A powerful metaphor for this worry was the violent insurrection Jan. 6, 2021, at the US Capitol, during which a Confederate battle flag was carried triumphantly, by an aggrieved Southerner, through the hallowed confines of Statuary Hall. Many, if not most, in the Jan. 6 mob […]
Posted inLGBTQ News
Stochastic terrorism and the Colorado Springs Club Q shooting
Reading Time: 7 minutes Humans are highly suggestible. We yawn together. We laugh together. And when given a sense of belonging, of shared identity, we flock together. Sometimes in wonderful, constructive ways. Other times, in ways that drive us to a deepening hatred of our fellow human beings. Other times, into overt violence against them. In the US this […]
Posted inCulture
First death penalty issued for Iranian protesters under expanded mandate
Reading Time: 3 minutes Last week, 227 members of Iran’s 290-person parliament advocated for harsher retributive actions to be taken against protesters arrested in the nation-wide demonstrations after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was brutally murdered by morality police in September. Prior to the parliament’s decision, the Islamic Revolution Court was already charging people connected to these protests with death penalty […]
Posted inTechnology
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-perception? Did we change in the real world based how our online […]