Big Machine by Victor Lavalle won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and an American Book Award.

It's a challenging and perplexing read. My best attempt to summarize it briefly is "Foucault's Pendulum with black people".

"Nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired"

It starts with an epigram from The Thing. And this provides some key to ( Read more... )

Hemant Mehta quotes David Silverman's article in the current issue of American Athiest:

"We must own the fact that some atheists can be bad people.

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We must keep our tent as large as possible, but we will not include anyone who embraces bigotry or merely turns a blind eye to it.
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If you are an atheist who believes that discrimination because of ( Read more... )

"The book is regularly listed as one of the best non-fiction books of the 20th century ( Read more... )

Creationist: Take a look at all you present, anything you think a 5 year old won't understand, explain it. Act like a teacher, Teach it first.

Endogenous RetrovirusesWhen mommies and daddies love each other very much, they make a recipe for a baby. They mix a copy of half of daddy’s recipe with a copy of half of mommy’s recipe to make a baby ( Read more... )

Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

This is an updated (2014) version of the 2004 original by Lakoff, a cognitive scientist at Berkeley.

Basic idea: conservative leaders have been better at framing issues than liberal counterparts ( Read more... )

Many people have recently opined about the justifiability of punching a Nazi(*) in the face. A surprising (to me) number of people are for it.

(*)To clarify, unless we're talking about these six Nazis, at best there are 'neo-Nazis' these days, or 'jerks with hateful ideas who are dangerously close to the levers of power'.I test the Nazi punch ( Read more... )

Why Violence Has Declined takes a long, long, too-long look at rates of violence over the past umpty-thousand years from our hunter-gatherer forebears to today. Pinker has marshalled a shitload of facts and statistics, and though there may be some niggling details here and there, on the whole, he's pretty convincing that rates of murder, war, and ( Read more... )

Islands of Space by John W. Campbell is the kind of gee-whiz space opera that makes Buck Rogers look nuanced. A passel of superscientist men effortlessly invent multiple impossible inventions and generally behave like 12-year-old boys with their new godlike powers ( Read more... )

Massimo Pigliucci has just about had it with the Skeptical & Atheist Movement. I think most of his targets are well-chosen. And I would join him in giving Dan Dennett a big hug.

"Oh, the biggest part is that Jesus told me that I am healed so it doesn’t matter what anybody says"