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At dotCommonweal, I empty a clip on a baffling piece of anti-global warming propaganda from the First Things blog. I was quite proud of my concluding sentence:
If the First Things crowd ever decides to do one of those fundraising cruises that have become so popular of late, I know of a river in Egypt that [...]
Filed under: environment, science/tech
Both of them elsewhere, though.
First of all, I’m honored to have been invited to contribute to the Commonweal blog, and my first post over there takes on Joe Carter’s recent criticisms of “theistic evolution”:
If God is omniscient, then his knowledge of the course of evolution is eternally perfect - and whether the evolutionary process was [...]
Filed under: environment, personal, religion, science/tech
Far-too-infrequent ObsidianWinger Sebastian has some good questions about the rhetoric surrounding the George Tiller murder. In the spirit of this post of hilzoy’s, however, it seems to me that an even better approach might be to ask whether, in the face of a series of violent attacks against the homes, property, and persons of UCLA [...]
Filed under: abortion, morality, politics, science/tech
by JL Wall
I suppose it was only a matter of time that, as our lives became more and more unified in the world of electrons at the expense of the world of matter, our deaths would, too. (And yes, I realize that I’m writing this for and posting this on a blog.) Not that online [...]
Filed under: media/culture, science/tech
“From where I sit”, reports Hannah Rosin in this diavlog, “everyone thinks you should breastfeed.” Can this possibly be right? And if so, doesn’t it say more about her seat than the societal trends she’s discussing? Here in ultra-progressive Berkeley and among our self-selecting group of friends, we’ve naturally experienced – and sometimes gone in [...]
Filed under: family, science/tech
by JL Wall
Working to reframe the question of whether Google makes us Stoopid, Peter Suderman (not without his own hesitations, I should add) ends his post over at The Scene:
Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than [...]
Filed under: media/culture, science/tech
by JL Wall
[EDIT: I really need to be better about remembering to sign my posts over here when I first put them up. For future reference, if they talk about being in Chicago and being Jewish, it's probably me. -- JLW]
I remember when the “Body Worlds” exhibit was in Chicago a few years ago and [...]
Filed under: morality, religion, science/tech
Having just finished reading it, I’ll join Ross and Rod and Will Wilkinson in strongly recommending Nicholas Davidoff’s profile of Freeman Dyson in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. It’s one of the most enjoyable pieces of this sort that I’ve read in quite a while. Here’s an especially choice bit:
What may trouble Dyson most [...]
Filed under: environment, science/tech
The philosopher just quoted on the Dish, I mean. Here’s another choice excerpt:
… the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn’t just misleading and wrong, it’s ugly. In that view, each of us is trapped in the caverns [...]
Filed under: philosophy, science/tech
Today is the 95th birthday of Norman Borlaug, the man who invented modern industrial agriculture and (some say) fed the world. Here is Ron Bailey’s post in honor of the day, which includes these striking remarks from a 2000 interview:
Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human [...]
Filed under: agriculture, food, science/tech