Gretchen From Change.org: What’s in a name? A 12-year-old girl at Hernando Middle School in Mississippi was beaten by five fellow students — reportedly because they said her name, Randi, was “a boy name.” “They started talking about me like I was a man,” she told local news station WREG. “That I shouldn’t be in this … Read more
Comment from m5 in reply to this blog entry on Dispatches from the Culture Wars: I’m pretty sure THIS guy and his ilk are the ones Phil Plait was talking about in his Don’t Be a Dick speech, and I wish certain people would stop insisting criticism of THIS sort of shit is the same … Read more
The “What would convince you that there is a god/supernatural/really weird thing out there?” argument continues. I didn’t read the whole thread. I’m feeling fatigued on the subject, honestly. It’s easy to demonstrate the existence of weird things (even really weird ones), rather more difficult to prove the supernatural (depending on how you define it), … Read more
This isn’t a new question, that’s for sure. I’ve been asked it more times than I can recall, starting roughly ten years ago when I thought it would be fun to go online and argue at length with strangers about whether it makes sense to believe in God or not. But apparently it has become … Read more
So as mentioned, I’m working my way through Frans de Waal’s book The Age of Empathy. On my drive I also listened to the audiobook of Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market, and it was almost comical to expose myself to both at the same time and read/listen to how both drew on the … Read more
Our session at AAR yesterday was really interesting and I’ll try to post about it later, but don’t really have the time right now. I’m just waking up in Oxford, Alabama, and will be driving through that state and Mississippi today listening to In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan. Most likely … Read more
Last night I couldn’t get to sleep right away, and stayed up watching Lawrence O’Donnell eviscerate some Tea Party leaders on his MSNBC show “The Last Word.” I don’t know their names or those of the particular groups they represented, but that was one thing about which O’Donnell made a big issue– the fact that … Read more
When visiting a place that has a reportedly good aquarium, I can’t not go and check it out for myself. For someone born and raised in Kansas, I have a strange thing for deep water and its inhabitants. Going to visit the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta on a Sunday which also happens to be Halloween … Read more
Here’s an excerpt from the list of very detailed instructions about what to do in every kind of emergency posted on my door: Attention-drawing red ellipse added by me Most of these instructions make pretty good sense, but the “DO NOT JUMP!” in all-caps is a little boggling. As mentioned previously, I’m on the 20th … Read more
Thousands of smiling, mild-mannered people with blue tote bags have descended on the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta. This is the 2010 American Academy of Religion conference. I’m posting from my room in that hotel, using the wireless internet that they made me pay for on top of the room rate. Why do expensive hotels … Read more