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

AHA Communications Assistant Christian Hagen calls 12 Years a Slave, a new movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Brad Pitt, a “challenging yet utterly essential” film. The implications and horrors of slavery have been... 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

We humanists can appreciate good quality television. Check out a few new shows and season openers that address humanist issues or feature humanist actors.  Television in 2013 is seeing something of a turnover. Breaking Bad... Read More

In theaters now, Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, explores two worlds in an unequal universe. Matthew Bulger reviews the film and its exploration of transhumanism. A few weeks ago I decided to go... Read More