November 27, 2023 In all my years of blogging, I’ve barely touched upon my life’s central thing: my marriage with Therese Broderick. (I’ve eschewed boastfulness, humility being one of my great virtues.) November 27 is our 35th anniversary. A recent David Brooks column deems marriage under-appreciated. Many younger Americans, he…

November 24, 2023 Predictably, the Middle East horrors bring out, too widely, not humanistic responses, but their antitheses. Ideological pathologies. The hard left (to borrow a Middle East trope) never misses an opportunity to shove its head up its butt. This we saw after the October 7 atrocity, with some…

November 20, 2023 Our democracy is in deep trouble. A big part of that is people unable to tell truth from lies (indeed, reality versus downright crazy) and which news sources to trust. A big part of that has been Trump, calling mainstream media “the enemy of the people.” …

November 15, 2023 A recent major poll showed Trump leading Biden in five of six key swing states. Many people won’t vote for Biden because he’s old. But will vote instead for a depraved comic-book villain? Another poll showed just 33% for Biden in a 3-way race, with 24% for…

November 10, 2023 Sarah Vowell is a living contradiction to the notion that history is dull. She writes history books almost as comedy routines. Yet still they’re full of real history. Her book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, sometimes digresses to lament — as the title hints — how…

November 6, 2023 This is a “philosophy contest” advertised by the “World Roundtable Association of Amateur and Professional Philosophers.”* It solicits a list of humanity’s top 20 problems, and their solutions. While our top few problems might seem pretty obvious — cue the “four horsemen” — solutions are not. Especially…

November 2, 2023 What does the Artificial Intelligence (AI) explosion mean for our future? That’s the Great Topic of the day. Back in 2013, my seminal Humanist magazine article, The Human Future: Upgrade or Replacement?* foresaw a convergence of biological humankind with the artificial — we’d incorporate ever more technological…

October 29, 2023 Gaza is a godforsaken place. (Why do most residents still worship that god?) Two million people crammed into an overcrowded ghetto. A prison camp. Long a wretched hell-hole, now even basic essentials of life and communication are cut off. With bombs raining down, hundreds of apartment buildings…

October 26, 2023 The Republican crazies got their way in the end after all. It had seemed the party was completely MAGA-gaga, with little left of its sane wing. But then during the House speakership ruckus, it might briefly have looked as though there was real division, with a sane…