Earth Over the Brink

Glacier National Park is drip, drip, dripping into a puddle. People and companies and governments are cutting down trees to burn them to save the planet from global warming, mixing the sacrificial trees with oh-so-clean... Read More

Living with Geoengineering Injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere would cool the planet considerably, so what’s holding us back? Quite a few things.

This past October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report saying that our current course will produce catastrophic results across the planet, including substantial sea level rise, by 2040. Another study focused... Read More

Support the Rule of Law, Not Autocracy

While our democracy has historically been described as a rule of law system under which we are governed “by laws and not of men” (a “nomocracy”), this characterization is flawed and dangerously misleading. In fact,... Read More

Voters Ready for Nonreligious Candidates

There’s always been an assumption in American politics that a candidate will lose votes if they admit to being an atheist, or even simply by not being openly religious. Now there’s some concrete proof that... Read More

Artificial Stupidity

Computers aren’t bigoted—they’re just based on cold calculations, right? The past two years have featured a steady drumbeat of problems with various artificial intelligence (AI) procedures, centered around a common theme: they produce the same... Read More

A Religious Blitz on Our Government

In July the House Appropriations Committee voted in favor of an amendment that would allow faith-based child welfare agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people, interfaith couples, single parents, and others. Earlier this year, I reported... Read More