The Present
All Stories
You don’t want to be so modest that you don’t’ do anything, and just sit there like a puddle, but when you do things, you constantly want to be checking for your own biases.
Are all true scientists destined to become atheists? The answer is no, or at least that doesn’t seem to be the case judging by statistics.
The hedgehog probes deeply and narrowly; the fox skims lightly and broadly.
Charles Murray has designed a quiz he hopes will have “a salutary effect on bringing to people’s attention the degree to which they live in a bubble that seals them off from an awful lot of their fellow American citizens.”
The underlying rules of 3D printing that help innovators get past key cost, time and complexity barriers.
Even if you’re not a royals watcher, you can’t avoid the saga of Will and Kate. Kate Middleton—wife of Prince William, current Duchess of Cambridge, possibly future Queen of England, […]
While the desire to tax churches is not new, it seems as far from reality as possible at this moment. As has been commented, no atheist could possibly hope to […]
Atheist author and magician Penn Jillette asks why we can’t use the word “holidays” instead of “Christmas” to be more inclusive.
Why do women find it so hard to resist ruthless, deceitful narcissists?
Jonah Lehrer’s post at The New Yorker details some worrying research on cognition and thinking through biases, indicating that “intelligence seems to make [such] things worse.” This is because, as […]
This essay was previously published on AlterNet. In the summer of 2010, I saw him several times a week: a portly, dark-skinned gentleman, leaning against a pillar in Penn Station […]
Guest post by Samantha Eliza Benten The Law of Non-Contradiction, as stated by Aristotle: “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same […]
Writer Tauriq Moosa argues that our objections to necrophilia come down to primal disgust, and that most ethical arguments against are logically untenable.
These words describe love, desire, and relationships that have no real English translation but they capture subtle realities that even English speakers have felt once or twice.
In most circumstances, narcissism doesn’t go over well. But there’s one big exception to the rule: leadership.
When researchers asked runners to repeat a specific phrase in their heads, like “push,” the runners performed substantially better than they had prior to the intervention.
What it means to go beyond seeing and to actually observe.
Why do Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic impact on readers and audiences? Philip Davis shows how Shakespeare’s use of language creates heightened brain activity, or what he calls “a theater of the brain.”
Impaired judgement aside, I bet a lot of men would like to know exactly how much they have to pay to sufficiently obligate their dates to have sex with them.
On the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy had to give a speech. In a world before blogs, Kennedy was in the awkward, yet history-making position […]
How ironic is it that the FOX News where Sean Hannity has been howling about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf wanting “Sharia law” to replace our existing laws is the very […]
The framers of the Constitution were careful to use the word “persons” says Strossen.
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