Soon after Rex Tillerson was fired as Secretary of State, Donald Trump named his probable successor (pending confirmation) as the United States’ head diplomat:... Read More

The 2006 Humanist of the Year doesn’t need rose-colored glasses to see what’s clear about humanity’s progress. STEVEN PINKER is a cognitive scientist, psychologist,... Read More

Excerpted from Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre, published by The MIT Press, March 2018. Copyright: 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.   “We... Read More

"Oh help me, please doctor, I’m damaged/There’s a pain where there once was a heart,” Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger sings on the... Read More

At a cocktail party recently, I met an unemployed mathematician/computer programmer. We talked about real estate, and then she told me how she’d gotten... Read More

On the day before Thanksgiving, 1994, the US General Services Administration sent one of its staff carpenters, a man named Richard Lyons, to check... Read More

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, could be criticized for how little it seems to discuss the Second Amendment... Read More

In her groundbreaking new book, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Black lesbian activist attorney Andrea J. Ritchie... Read More

I occasionally meet with delegations of visitors from overseas as part of a program run by the US State Department. The visitors, usually government... Read More

Contains mild spoilers for one episode of The Good Place. There's a ton of magic and religion in our popular culture. I don't mean... Read More