iMortal
From Toothpaste for Dinner. Read more
From Toothpaste for Dinner. Read more
My wife asked me a question I at first dismissed when I told her about the previous post. I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. But I was telling her about the subject of the post, how I thought folks were wrong to perennially demand Sam Harris’s, or anyone else’s head on a platter when there has been a perceived violation of liberal principle. And she said, But, aren’t they just people saying stuff…on the Internet? Well, yes, but come on!... Read more
Here is Sam Harris’s great sin: In the context of many hot-button issues, the data leads him to a conclusion or approach that conflicts with one or another liberal orthodoxy. Liberals and seculars, not immune from the same faults as other humans over whom we feel superior, then commence with knee-jerk tantrums over Harris’s perceived violation. This is how it always goes. Harris holds a position on an issue that conflicts with our gut-level sense of fairness or compassion or... Read more
Whatever’s bothering you, however crappy you’re feeling, this Tumblr will make you feel at least a little bit better. Unless you’re a bad person. (Hat tip to Moglia.) Read more
David Free in The Atlantic susses out what about Monty Python worked so well, and why we can’t have that today. It’s a pity that the word irreverent has lost its weight, so that it’s come to seem a mere synonym for cheeky. The Pythons were irreverent in the deepest sense. They had automatic respect for nothing. Everything was fit matter for comedy: religion, national differences, cannibalism, Hitler, torture, death, crucifixion. They created a parallel world in which nothing was... Read more
Apparently, I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Internet comment sections. Neither does science. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: In an experiment . . . about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group of comments that were uncivil, including name-calling. Others saw more civil comments. “Disturbingly, readers’ interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the... Read more
Note from May 2015: This was written when I was blogging at Freethought Blogs, which of course I no longer do. The substance of the post remains true. I don’t generally like comments sections. Though I appreciate the ethos behind them, the notion that a blog is a place where folks can continue an article’s discussion beyond the written post, it rarely serves this purpose. Most of the time, in my experience as a reader and writer, comments are usually... Read more
Friend of the blog, and our whole little family, really, Meg Rhem, has advice for fathers of daughters (and I have a baby daughter). Dads, here’s a big one: do not ever, under any circumstance, refer to a woman as a whore or a slut. These words are violent, they are hateful, and their only function is to undermine female agency, to diminish women as a whole. Think of them the same way you think of the “n” word. They... Read more
Considering the recurring subjects of e-readers and gadgets on this blog, it seems appropriate to mark the passing of Michael Cronan, the guy who gave the Kindle its name. From the Times: When Amazon prepared to introduce its first electronic reader in 2007, it turned to Mr. Cronan, who envisioned imagery reflecting the reading experience as an embryonic but rising technology. . . . in pondering a brand name, Mr. Cronan “wanted to create something small, humble, with no braggadocio,”... Read more
It’s been almost a week with the Nexus 7, and since the kids are finally asleep, I thought this might be my one chance to follow up from my first post and report on how it’s been going. And much to my surprise, it’s going extremely well. Put it this way. I haven’t picked up my iPad 3 since turning on my Nexus. And not just because I wanted to intentionally eschew the iPad for the sake of this trial... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In