science
KtB Wants You…To Write About the Eclipse
The total solar eclipse passing over the continental U.S. this August 21st is the first to do so in 99 years, but American eclipse stories go back much farther than…
“It’s The World That’s Strange”
Barbara Ehrenreich talks to Jeff Sharlet about her new book, mysticism, secrecy, and science.
Big Bang Fingerprints
We all leave our traces. Even campers who fastidiously carry their garbage out of the woods leave footprints behind. Flora and fauna from millions of years ago are found fossilized…
Ham on Nye: Beyond the Debate
Having been party to an extremely brief and insignificant debate with Ken Ham in these pages over the account of his Creation Museum in my 2011 book Paradise Lust: Searching…
Baseball Literalism
There is a long and often ridiculous history of comparing baseball to a religion. Rule-bound, slow to change, cyclic, and timeless; an assembly of people presided over by men in funny…
Love is an Animal Thing
Barbara King’s new book How Animals Grieve raises questions about grief, and its emotional corollary, love, for humans too.
Adam and Eve or Bust
You’ve probably heard about Professor John R. Schneider, who lost his job at Calvin College, a Christian school, for claiming that Adam and Eve could not have been real people.…
Stephen Hawking Decrees God Away
This afternoon on the New York subway I came across this little gem, this “train of thought” meant to inspire who-knows-what among riders in the course of their usual hum-drum…
A Pier into the Brain
Vladimir Lipovetsky M.D. from Los Angeles writes in about Robert Jensen’s “The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman“: The trouble with many articles that explore applications and limitations…
Does Science Need Religion?
When one is out to study religion, or to cover the religion beat, it can be awfully tempting to see religion everywhere you look as the all-satisfying explanation for everything.…
The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman
A neuroscientist imagines life beyond the brain.
Martyr City
If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a…
