Who was the first person really? Why are there so many different kinds of animals? What are things made of? Why do we have night and day, winter and summer? Why do bad things happen?... Read More

For those of us who love Kurt Vonnegut’s books, and the humanist persona that surrounds many of them, Charles Shields new biography "Kurt Vonnegut: A Life" is a bit of a jolt. The man Shields... Read More

The Rapture is not dead. Despite the biblical admonition found in Matthew 24:36 (NIV) that, “about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the... Read More

The late Richard Rorty, a distinguished humanist philosopher, opened his 1993 Amnesty International lecture with a shocking account of sexual sadism perpetrated against Bosnian Muslims by Serbs during the ethnic war that was still raging... Read More

“America,” Jonathan Kay writes in Among the Truthers, “has always been a land of cranks.” And his investigation of contemporary paranoid conspiracy theories and their precursors, and the people who cherish them, tends to prove... Read More

Readers of a certain age might remember the “phone phreaks” of the 1960s and ’70s who deviously manipulated telephone technology in order to make free long distance calls, disclose American Telephone and Telegraph secrets and,... Read More

  As rumor has it, Seamus McGraw’s rough draft of The End of Country ignited a bidding war among New York’s leading publishing houses. It doesn’t take more than the first few pages and an... Read More