In today’s Wall Street Journal is an essay aimed at the advancing ranks of atheist authors. The names mentioned are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, but the brunt of the artillery is directed at Mr. Hitchens (who is evidently a friend of the author, Peter Berkowitz, a fellow of […]
Given recent comments and emails, I should probably clarify my thoughts about religion’s place in the world. Though I have written rather disapprovingly on the topic lately, and although I do indeed think that religion is, and has been, an enormous retrograde influence on civilization’s progress (some lovely music and architecture notwithstanding), and an inexhaustible […]
It is a poorly kept secret that I am deeply skeptical of religious beliefs and institutions. The empirical question of whether their net effect is a boon or a blight upon our wretched species is, one could conceivably argue, still an open one, and I do acknowledge that religion provides a harmless existential anodyne for […]
With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here is a wonderful example of the power of punctuation to alter the meaning of written English.
On Sunday, the New York Times published a long editorial, The Road Home, declaring the US effort in Iraq an utter failure, and insisting that we withdraw forthwith. Many agree. Of course, many of those who agree do so more from a visceral loathing of this administration and distrust of government in general, an inchoate […]
Those of you with an interest in astronomy, and a fondness for order, might like to take a look here.
In a post a while back I explained why I don’t own an iPod or similar such gadget, the main reason being that I don’t enjoy the acoustic isolation they impose. Well, it turns out that there’s another reason you might want to doff those ear goggles from time to time; learn more here.
We seem to have been delivered, however briefly, from the suffocating heat and humidity that have tormented us for the past few days. During the afternoon a robust frontal boundary made its way Gothamward across the Keystone and Garden States, and at about 5:30 or so the sky turned as black as an old bruise, […]
I’m not quite myself tonight. Not only has the ghastly heat and fetor here in Gotham reduced me to a gibbering wretch, but at the end of the day I visited my periodontist, Dr. Louis Franzetti, who implanted two small screws in my upper jaw as part of an ongoing cakehole-reconstruction project roughly on the […]
The other day, my mind restless with the somber news of the world, and its echoes of familiar themes, I took from the shelf The Gathering Storm, the first book of Winston Churchill’s incomparable six-volume History of the Second World War. I say “incomparable” because there is really nothing else like it in all of […]
I’m a peaceable fellow, but it was not without a wee quickening of my Scottish heart that I read (with a tip of the tam o’shanter to Dennis Mangan and his commenters) of the reception given a couple of jihadists recently up in Glasgow.
More stern stuff from Hitchens on the British terror plot, here.
Alright, so much for “Back in Black”. Thanks to those who contacted me to tell me how much they disliked that new theme; I’ll find something else.
I was tired of the old look. What do you think? [Note: I had experimented with another visual theme, but nobody liked it, and I soon reverted. So this post might make little sense now.]
I don’t comment over at Bill Vallicella’s website any more, but I still follow the conversations there, as they are often interesting, and attract a number of intelligent participants. Bill has put up an odd post today, however, which he calls The Humanity Delusion, in an obvious swipe at Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto The God […]
Well, after such a plangent cri de coeur, it’s time to lighten up a little; one thing I always find amusing is to have a look at the search keyphrases that have brought folks here. Here’s a sampling of the current year’s crop:
I am going to have to stop reading the news one of these days, I think. What it brings me, day in and day out, is a bitter harvest of suffering and misery, gathered from all the world over, and it is getting to be more than I can bear.
I recently promised readers a glimpse into my latest literary purchase — a 1936 publication called The World’s Best Jokes — and here it is. (We are on holiday at the moment, and I am simply too worn out from lying on the beach in the warm July sun, and from consuming draft beer and […]
The Washington Post offers us an interesting and disturbing glimpse into the private life of President Bush; it is an odd life of isolation, and, one has to imagine, a kind of desperation as well. From the article: After reading Andrew Roberts’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” Bush brought in the author […]
We’re spending a few days at our seaside retreat in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on the outer extremity of Cape Cod, and today found the memsahib and me poking around at a local flea market. I’m always on the lookout for odd books, and after I had already, with reluctance, been talked by my better half out […]
Over at Dr. William Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website there is a dicussion thread underway, prompted by a silly item in the New York Times about cognitive neuroscience and the soul. In the original article, the author, obviously unfamiliar with the labyrinthine convolutions of mind-body philosophy, embarrasses herself with the following: But as evolutionary biologists and […]
No-one should be surprised by the grumbling on the Left about the Supreme Court’s decision on racial discrimination, for reasons that hardly need enumeration here. In broaching the subject at all I am on thin ice, as a white male: a member of a morally stunted, congenitally tainted group that is deemed in many circles […]
Michael Moore is on his (presumably steel-reinforced) soapbox once again. In his newest movie, Sicko, he brings his folksy propaganda style to bear on the American health-care system, which is, he alleges, fundamentally inferior to the socialized arrangements in place in other countries, including even the tyrannized and impoverished nation of Cuba (whose “revolutionary” medical […]
Today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I enthusiastically recommend as an excellent source of news about all branches of science) had an interesting item about social hierarchies in fish. As is so often the case with discoveries of organizing principles in nature, the research is likely to help us understand not just the particular system under examination […]
A little while ago we opined that, odd as it may seem, here in America the particulars of a politician’s faith matter less than that he have some sort of religious affiliation. Quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney seems to agree: I think the American people want a person of faith to lead […]
I should probably have done a bit more research before posting the preceding item; the legalities in this case are clearer than I had realized. Most states, including Ohio, consider “non-therapeutic” abortions after 24 weeks to be unlawful; it appears also that the Ohio criminal code considers the “unlawful termination of another’s pregnancy” to be […]
As noted by Steven Pinker in his introduction to the 2007 Edge Question, there are some topics that one ventures into at one’s own risk. Here’s one: The police in Canton, Ohio, have just arrested one Bobby Cutts, Jr., for the foul and gruesome murder of Jessie Davis, who was due to give birth in […]
We had a real treat Thursday night: the Celebrate Brooklyn outdoor-concert series presented a performance by the Richard Thompson Band at the Prospect Park Bandshell. If you aren’t familiar with Richard Thompson, you should be: since his early days as a member of Fairport Convention back in the 60’s, he has been regarded as one […]
While poking around at Andrew Staroscik’s brand-new biology weblog Mixotrophy, I found a link to a remarkable presentation, by one Blaise Aguera y Arcas, from this year’s TED Conference. He is describing a new image-display technology called Seadragon, which is in turn the engine that powers a new system, Photosynth, that programmatically assembles tagged photos […]
Each year the website Edge.org — which I will recommend once again to you all, as it is one of the Web’s most stimulating destinations — asks the intellectual community a carefully chosen question, presents the answers on its website, and then gathers them together into a book. Previous questions have included What Questions Are […]
We don’t often offer video selections in this space two days running, but time, unfortunately, does not permit a lengthy post today. So here is a remarkable glimpse of the vicissitudes of life on the veldt, featuring a herd of Cape buffaloes, a hunting party of lionesses, and even a crocodile or two. Place your […]
Here’s an odd little item that popped up in the news yesterday: a strange ball of light (which, curiously, seems to cast a sort of shadow) moseying around the parking lot of the First Judicial Courthouse in Santa Fe, NM. It was picked up by a surveillance camera, and the video has been making the […]
With a hat tip to Peter Hankins, today we take a look at a simple yet outstandingly accurate piece of meteorological technology: the Weather Stone.
The late Victorian era was a time of smug certainty in the scientific world. The Darwinian revolution had the God of the Gaps on the run, technological innovation was accelerating briskly, and the great intellectual cataclysms of the 20th century — relativity, quantum mechanics, and Gödel’s theorem, foremost among many — were still nothing more […]
Among the books and periodicals I have hoarded here at home are quite a few old issues of National Geographic: I’ve been a subscriber since the early 80’s, and don’t throw them away. I’ll often pull out an old copy in an idle moment, and yesterday I was looking at one from December 1988. The […]
Today I drove my son Nick up to Becket, MA, in the heart of the Berkshires, where he will be spending the summer as a counselor at Camp Becket, a healthy and wholesome place if ever there was one. This morning my car was parked several blocks from my home, and as I was walking […]
The prominent Swiss Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan is a controversial figure: to some, he is an important moderate voice, one that could do much to heal the deepening rift between Islamic and Western culture, while to others his call for an assimilable, Europeanized form of Islam masks a more radical agenda that is closer to […]
One of the warmer and more persistent disagreements between liberal and conservative viewpoints in recent years has been over the commingling of religion with politics. We hear a steady drumbeat from the Left alleging that the Bush cadre is trying to turn the USA into a “theocracy”, and in academic circles, where the prevailing attitude […]
We are back from San Francisco, having enjoyed ourselves immensely. We stayed at the highly recommended Huntington Hotel, on the Matterhorn-like eminence known as Nob Hill, with a delightful view northward over the Bay from the 10th floor. We dined at a succession of splendid restaurants (in particular I recommend Venticello and Rue Lepic), and […]
We will be gone for a few days: my lovely and patient wife Nina and I are off to San Francisco to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. I may have a moment here and there to write, but quite possibly not. We’ll be back at the beginning of next week, but meanwhile, please browse our […]
Today, June 4th, would have been my mother’s 72nd birthday. I thank again all of you who offered so many kind words of support during her last days, which were chronicled in these pages a little over a year ago. She was a truly exceptional woman, and we miss her terribly.
We call your attention to a recent addition to our sidebar: Duff and Nonsense, a website maintained by one David Duff, who lives and writes, I believe, in Ireland. Mr. Duff has commented on some recent posts here at waka waka waka, and upon following the links back to his own site, I spent a […]
Well, it’s begun again: the annual descent into Hell that is summer in Gotham. Today got up to around 90°, with life-threatening humidity, and a pitiless white sky. These are, of course, optimal conditions for moving furniture up and down several flights of stairs, which was how I spent much of the afternoon, as my […]
In the J. Robert Oppenheimer speech about Einstein that was the subject of yesterday’s post, we find the following paragraph: Einstein is also, and I think rightly, known as a man of very great good will and humanity. Indeed, if I had to think of a single word for his attitude towards human problems, I […]
From my friend Jess Kaplan comes a link to the text of a 1966 speech by Robert Oppenheimer about Albert Einstein, whom Oppenheimer of course knew for decades. It is a fascinating glimpse into the personality of the great man, and readers are encouraged to take a look. (It is also far less controversial and […]
I’ve sparked more than a few arguments in these pages over the last couple of years by my support — primarily on moral grounds — for the ouster of Saddam, and by taking very seriously the threat to the West presented by Islamic extremism. While I’m not the right-wing moonbat that some folks seem to […]
The New York Public Library recently hosted a debate between The Reverend Al Sharpton and the journalist, author and gadfly Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, in case you hadn’t heard, has recently mounted the increasingly crowded atheist soapbox — joining, most prominently, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett — with his book God Is Not Great: […]
There’ll be nothing in this space today about dualism, Darwin, Iraq, religion, or any of the rest of the tedium that usually plumps up these pages. No, today was a day to set all that dull and dreary business aside, because the Incredible Casuals were kicking off their 27th season at the legendary Wellfleet Beachcomber. […]
We welcome two new additions to the waka waka waka sidebar tonight. The first, called Mixotrophy, is a brand new blog by reader and commenter Andrew Staroscik, a bacteriologist and oceanographer. The other, recommended by Andrew, is the blog Sandwalk, which is the website of one Larry Moran, a professor of biochemistry at the University […]
I’ve had a long drive, at the end of a long day, to wrap up a long week. So for tonight I’m just going to leave you with a wonderful short story by the great Isaac Asimov — an old favorite that I just found online. It’s called The Last Question, and it’s a gem. […]