Uncertain Humanism and the Water of Whiteness

IN 2005, one of today’s most revered American writers, David Foster Wallace (now deceased), delivered a commencement address to graduates of Kenyon College, titled “This Is Water.” The twenty-minute speech is worth a listen or read, freely available on YouTube and in Wallace’s eponymous 2009 collection, This Is Water: Some...

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Features

Up Front

Pathologies of Power

"A tyranny," Plato says in the Republic, "is the wretchedest form of government," and "a tyrant grows worse from having power: he becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more friendless, more...

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Reviews

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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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

Is It Time to Talk About Reparations?

FROM TIME TO TIME, I’ll receive emails and calls from humanists and atheists thanking me for my work—and in those short exchanges I’m often told that I am an important new voice advancing humanism. While I appreciate these comments, I can’t help...

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