There he was, gnomically staring out from the cover of the March 29, 2009, New York Times magazine. The accompanying article proclaimed Freeman Dyson as a global warming heretic. Was he actually allying himself with... Read More

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” Mark Twain famously quipped. After almost a decade of delay in addressing the climate changes brought on by well-documented global warming, certain segments of American society are still... Read More

Henceforth, people will be looking at the universe with the eyes of oxen.    —Katib Chelebi, seventeenth-century geographer “Barack Obama won’t show us his birth certificate,” insists Steve, a Connecticut resident and small business owner, while... Read More

Humanity has a curious relationship with sex. It obviously enjoys it—there are nearly seven billion people in the world and not all that output could be the fruit of duty. Yet, for a practice so... Read More

The new decade was ushered in by a disturbing headline: “Ireland’s New Blasphemy Law Goes into Effect.” New blasphemy law? Don’t those belong in some earlier century? The unfortunate answer is no—blasphemy laws are making... Read More

The publication of Robert Coover’s audacious 1977 novel, The Public Burning, almost never happened. The book uses the circumstances surrounding the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (sentenced to death for allegedly providing the... Read More

Author and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Pantheon, 2010), follows the past and present of one Cass Seltzer, a professor of the philosophy... Read More