After writing my previous post chastising the National Atheist Party, I thought (and hoped) that I’d be done writing about Reason Rally drama. Alas, it was not to be. Apparently, […]
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What’s the Big Idea? Big Think co-founder Peter Hopkins is fond of thinking against the grain, and when it comes to the current debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act […]
The closest thing the US has to a “Yemen Czar” is John Brennan, President Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser, and so when he speaks on Yemen – as he did […]
I just can’t help myself. It’s remarkable how little I care about the outcome of the Koch-Cato standoff. Yet, having spent about half my professional life in politics at heavily […]
Like their namesakes from fable who live under bridges, “Trolls” are people who write nasty remarks and live underneath an online article, in its Comments section. Media mavens and content […]
Politics makes us stupid. This is one of my recurring themes. This is the principal reason I refuse to be a partisan or ideological team player. People call me libertarian […]
The fundamental source of prejudice is not ideology, but rather a basic human need and way of thinking, says a new study. To reduce prejudice we must first recognize the role it plays in our daily lives.
“Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime,” Edmund Burke wrote in 1757 in his A Philosophical Inquiry Into the […]
On the Internet, we’ve reached a tipping point where more than 50% of all Internet traffic is no longer generated by humans – instead, it’s generated by a motley mix […]
Sometimes, when a comment thread bogs down in a long and protracted debate, highly enlightening comments can get lost in the heap. In the cause of preventing one such comment […]
Last month, I posted my review of “An Unquenchable Thirst”, Mary Johnson’s luminous and enlightening memoir about the twenty years she spent as one of Mother Teresa’s nuns. After writing […]
This essay was previously published on AlterNet. The death of Christopher Hitchens in December sparked an outpouring of tributes. Most of them praised his best qualities: his ferocious courage, his […]
On Sunday, Andrew Sullivan offered a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s new book, When I Was A Child I Read Books, as excerpted in Guernica: Jefferson says that we are endowed with […]
[Editor’s Note: Please welcome Sarah Jane Braasch-Joy back to Daylight Atheism! Regular readers from before my move to Big Think will remember her as a dedicated defender of feminism and […]
The accusation “you are not living in the real world” is always either ideological, narcissistic, or a poorly phrased attempt to say something else. But it is frequently used. I […]
Following the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, subsequent economic downturn, innumerable investigative journalism pieces about the big banks and investment practices, and finally the rise of the Occupy […]
This weekend, I spoke at the University of North Dakota, courtesy of an invitation from FUND, the local SSA affiliate. Yes, there are atheists in North Dakota! For those who […]
Threats and outrage can no more shut up ideas than a cage made of smoke. It’s time we stop using violent tactics, as ways to voice our disagreements. In case […]
The Institution for Economic Affairs, a free-market British think-tank, has released a freely-downloadable edited volume titled … and the Pursuit of Happiness, packed with papers summarizing the public-policy implications of […]
How can individual employees as well as managers create a more pleasant work environment? Thinking positively and giving to others are two good places to start.
One of our most able and informed scientific journalists, William Saletan, astutely summarizes the pioneering contribution of the dissident evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt: Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats […]
I’m getting excited for the Reason Rally next weekend in Washington, D.C., which promises to be the largest and most spectacular atheist gathering in recent history – possibly the largest […]
Francis Fukuyama argues the intensity of conflict during the Warring States period in China created incentives for people to abandon kinship-based relationships in favor of new, merit-based institutions. This led to the formation of the State as we recognize it.
Given the large number of orphaned children in the world, I can see no reason why people should create children. Secondly, a failure to become adoptive parents is not sufficient reason to then procreate.
Yesterday I griped at length over at The Economist about Rick Santorum’s so-called “economic freedom agenda.” One point of Santorum’s ten-point plan includes tripling the tax-code subsidy for kids. I […]
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”Immigration is an integral part of the story Americans tell themselves about who they are. So why is it so difficult to immigrate here?
I’ve previously written about the case of Jessica Ahlquist, an incredibly brave young atheist from Rhode Island who’s the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging an unconstitutional “School Prayer” banner […]
Via Dangerous Intersection, I saw this TED lecture by Daniel Kahnemann, based on his book Thinking Fast and Slow, about the conflict between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”. […]
At the Brooklyn Museum’s current retrospective of Keith Haring’s early work, titled Keith Haring: 1978–1982, you can view what may be the earliest video of the artist at work. In […]
Legislation has been proposed in Arizona that would allow employers to force women to provide documentation of their “medical” reasons for needing birth control before their health insurance would have […]