Changing Times in America’s Execution Capital
A father’s successful struggle to spare the son who killed the rest of the family highlights how Texas, historically America’s top executioner, is moving away from the death penalty to reflect a national trend. With... Read More
Good or Bad to the Bone? How Human Genetics Affect Empathy
Meet Sally and Ann. Sally has a basket. Ann has a box. Sally puts a marble inside her basket and goes outside to play (where she can no longer see her basket). While Sally is... Read More
Enlightenment Wow: The Humanist Interview with Steven Pinker
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, linguist, popular science author, and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department... Read More
Fighting Post-Truth
Excerpted from Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre, published by The MIT Press, March 2018. Copyright: 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the... Read More
It’s Long Been a Man’s World. Can Women Save It?
"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 band’s 1968 song, “Dear Doctor.” But, alas, it’s more than a... Read More
Paranoia and the Pursuit of Happiness
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 rid of a squirrel that was nesting in her attic, but... Read More
Finding Clara Barton
On the day before Thanksgiving, 1994, the US General Services Administration sent one of its staff carpenters, a man named Richard Lyons, to check out a block of vacant buildings it had acquired on a... Read More