Star Turn

SINCE LONG BEFORE the oldest physical creations in human culture—the raising of the step pyramid at Saqqara or the Great Wall of China, for example—people have been telling stories of human origins. Through religion, such explanations have become creation myths, sacred genealogies, epic tales, and pious platitudes (e.g., “you are...

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Features

Up Front

Terror-Go-Round: Breaking the Cycle of Xenophobia

As the German and French national football teams entertained a crowd of 80,000 supporters inside Paris’s Stade de France on Friday, November 13, three cowardly men—hellbent on the destruction of modernity and peace—tried unsuccessfully to get...

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Reviews

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

“I Stand for Freedom for All”

This text is excerpted from the remarks of Commissioner Mohamed Magid of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom made at the launch event for the 2023 Freedom of Thought Report from Humanists International. The event was held on Capitol Hill in...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence

Editor’s note: OpenAI’s now famous ChatGPT bot was used by the Humanist to generate this article as an experiment to discover what today’s AI knows 
and will tell about the dangers posed by AI technology. IN RECENT YEARS, the rapid advancements in...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Fragility of Truth in the Existential Crisis

Dr. Michael E. Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. He is director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

More Light Than Heat

The Climate Book, a massive anthology compiled by Greta Thunberg—the young Swedish environmental activist who won global fame after she launched her School Strike for Climate in 2018—offers a compendious treatment of climate change. Its five parts offer to explain how climate...

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