Hector A. Garcia’s new book, Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious Violence and Oppression, successfully draws parallels between violence in human evolution and in dominant religions. He effectively illustrates the salience of the connection with... Read More

The New York Times reviewed Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire by immediately reminding readers that Crane, “America’s first rock-star writer,” appears on the album cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.... Read More

Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. As a scientist, his day job involves performing genetic analyses on fruit flies in order to better... Read More

Whether someone becomes addicted to drugs has much more to do with their childhood and their quality of life than with the drug they use or with anything in their genes. This is one of... Read More

One would expect no less than unflinching objectivity and critical thinking from Marshall Brain, the founder of HowStuffWorks.com. Still, the territory of his new book, How “God” Works, is quite different from his popular website,... Read More

Food. It’s not just what we eat. We talk about it, write about it, dream about it, paint pictures of it, and finally become it. In Sandra M. Gilbert’s The Culinary Imagination, the poet and... Read More

In nature, absent humans, you rarely find truly altruistic behavior, and when you do, there’s an explanation available that shows how that behavior arises through what you might call natural causes. So mama bear risks... Read More