Mapping Metaphor: This Is Your Brain on Figurative Language

“Children may not understand political alliances or intellectual argumentation, but they surely understand rubber bands and fistfights.”--Steven Pinker, from The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Viking, 2007). Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Then again, mischief is the hot smoke that curls off the end of...

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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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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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