Here’s what I’ve been covering at FiveThirtyEight this past week (and, coming up this week, I’ve got a piece in the works that gives me the chance to mention rinderpest!) The U.K.’s New At-Home HIV Test Is Better Than Anything We Have In The U.S. In the U.K., checking your HIV status is now nearly as easy as taking a pregnancy test. BioSure UK has begun selling a $45 take-home HIV test that lets customers prick their fingers, smear the blood... Read more
— 1 — Guess where I was last night? After the movie, a couple girls asked to take a picture with me and then said, “Are you a student at Georgetown, too?” “Nope!” I said, “I’m an adult!” And this is what adults do: — 2 — In other fictional universe news, I tend to recommend Diane Duane’s Young Wizard series fairly often on this blog (well, at least books 1-6 in the series), so I thought I should tip you... Read more
I got to talk to Jen Fulwiler, the author of Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It on her SiriusXM show today. If you’d like to tune in, Jen’s show repeats on the Catholic Channel on Thursday (today!) at 4p ET; Friday 12a and 6a (too early for me) and Saturday at 1p. Jen and I spent most of the time talking about our approaches to petitionary prayer (why tell God something He already knows?)... Read more
I’m discussing Effective Altruism and (possibly!) defusing some concerns about this growing, evidence-based movement in a conversation with Matt Gerken at Philanthropy Daily. I really appreciation Matt raising some common qualms people have about Effective Altruism (What does this mean for local causes? What about goods that are hard to measure) and having me over to his site to engage them. I’ve posted one of our exchanges below, and you can see the rest at Philanthropy Daily Matt: I’m also worried... Read more
Once my book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer, (out May 7th! Tell your friends) was written, there was a lot of editing to come. At one point, my editor wrote up a style sheet — basically a document warning the copyeditor about any deliberate deviations from normal spelling/grammar and as a heads-up for any particularly obscure words. I thought it might be fun to collect a few of the terms that appeared on my style... Read more
While I was in Australia, I had the pleasure of speaking at a Theology on Tap in Sydney. This was the first talk I’ve done specifically on my book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer (out next week!) and I had a great time talking about my approach to prayer and fielding questions from the 400 people in attendance. My talk, which includes me doing a cha-cha basic in order to explain how I learned to pray... Read more
This past week at FiveThirtyEight, I’ve been covering the grim calculus of migrant ships, the difficult data on drones, smoking laws, and cancer tests. Read on below! Migrants Trying To Cross The Mediterranean Are Leaving One Risk For Another When countries confront refugees that aren’t in mortal danger, they’ve found ways to avoid allowing migrants to land and file asylum pleas. In 2013, Australia set up new patrols to intercept boats of refugees arriving from Indonesia and to tow them to... Read more
You can listen to “Fights in Good Faith,” my weekly radio program, streaming today at 5pm ET and tomorrow (Sun) at 1pm. I’ll update this post when the episode is available to download and stream. Every week, I put up a “Radio Readings” post, so you can track down the books, articles, and (this week) failed Lenten penances that I cite on the show. So, without further ado, here’s what I’m talking about this week. Finding a Word for Your Sexuality It Happened... Read more
This is part of the 2015 Ideological Turing Test series, where Christians and non-Christians test how well they understand one another. In this second round, non-Christians (mostly atheists) answer the prompts honestly, and Christians try to answer them as they expect atheists to. Your job is to see if you can spot the difference. You can find all posts about the 2015 Ideological Turing Test here. Below are answers to the question: What’s a question you’re currently uncertain about,... Read more
I did an interview with The Catholic Weekly while I was in Sydney, and talked a little about my conversion, my book, and my approach to arguments and anger. I’ve excerpted it below, and you can read the full story here. Q: Obviously you are in demand as a public speaker. What is it that people most want to hear from you? A: There tend to be two things people want to hear from me. One is my conversion story, which... Read more
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