Marlena Trafas
Marlena Trafas recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in political economy. She has written for her campus’s online culture magazine, The Weekender, and the San Francisco based publication, Lone Wolf Magazine. After interning during summer 2017 for the Humanist magazine, she will next be working at a speechwriting firm in New York.
Posts by Marlena Trafas
Making Good: Humanist Philanthropy and the Duty to Give
WHILE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES have long been touted as philanthropic and generous, with many datasets showing that religious people give more money to charities compared... Read More
Total Eclipse of the Smart?
“I’m not a person of faith, but even so, the sun’s reappearance as the moon drew away seemed like the first line of Genesis... Read More
Celebrating Robert G. Ingersoll, “The Great Agnostic”
Robert G. Ingersoll was born on this day, August 11, in 1833. Ingersoll was a Civil War veteran, a lawyer, an orator, and most... Read More
Religious Humor and Its Discontents
In Seinfeld’s 153rd episode, “The Yada Yada,” Jerry’s dentist converts to Judaism and begins to make Jewish-themed wisecracks, so much so, Jerry quips that... Read More
Closing Time: Harvard’s Ban on Single-Sex Social Clubs
Absolute bans rarely fix problems. The ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and the following thirteen years of Prohibition, for example, didn’t end drinking but... Read More
The Liberal Lean to States’ Rights
“Our administration wants you to innovate. Now is the time to usher in a new era of state-based innovation,” Vice President Mike Pence recently... Read More
This Is What Democracy (of, by, and for the People) Looks Like
I’d never been in a Senate office building before. Although it made perfect sense, I wasn’t expecting to have to walk through a metal... Read More