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

We’ve all wondered at one point or another—in the aggravating moment when our GPS fails, or when our smartphone’s battery dies—are we becoming overly dependent on technology? Writer-director Spike Jonze takes this question a step... 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

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