In Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create The Modern World, author Mitchell Stephens delivers a readable, vibrant history of disbelief and atheistic thought, arguing persuasively that intellectual challenges to religious belief were a... Read More

It’s interesting to think that there is no archaeological evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ, or any of his followers. The Talpiot tomb has come close to proving the burial of Jesus and family,... Read More

In 1935 acerbic Minnesota novelist Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, a disturbing book about a fascist takeover in the United States. Fifty years later, Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale, another disturbing book,... Read More

Tom Standage’s self-imposed mandate is to assuage our technoterror. In books like his laudable study of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet (1998), and An Edible History of Humanity (2009), the author demonstrated, mostly successfully, that... Read More

Ronald Dworkin’s last book, Religion Without God, is simultaneously a blast from the past and a sign of the times. He claims to be religious and atheist in a manner that has some parallels in... Read More

I sometimes have the impression that philosophers write books mainly for each other. Not so Daniel Dennett, whose latest book is aimed at ordinary civilians like us, and couched in language we can understand without... Read More

In The Selfish Gene (1976) Richard Dawkins proposed the term “meme” as a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene, in that both are transmitters of information. The gene’s information is expressed in its... Read More