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:

Hearing the Voices of People on the Ground

Amy Goodman received the Humanist of the Year Award at the American Humanist Association’s 83rd Annual Conference, held virtually in September 2024. The award recognizes a person of national and international reputation who, through the application of humanist values, has made a...

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Celebrating 10 Years of The Humanist. com

In February 2014, the American Humanist Association created an innovative newsletter, theHumanist.com, as a digital companion to the Humanist print magazine. In announcing the first edition of the new weekly publication and online hub, then-editor Jennifer Bardi wrote about the origins and...

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The Black Practice of Disbelief

The following excerpt is from a new book from Beacon Press, set to be published in May 2024. Introduction I have grown to like “nontheist” as a broad-spectrum term that carries less baggage than more commonly used words such as “atheist” or...

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“I Stand for Freedom for All”

This text is excerpted from the remarks of Commissioner Mohamed Magid of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom made at the launch event for the 2023 Freedom of Thought Report from Humanists International. The event was held on Capitol Hill in...

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