A Year in the UK’s Most Radicalized Town
Terrorism is on the rise. But as ISIS is being beaten back in the East, their operations have only increased in the West. 2016 saw a slew of Islamist atrocities throughout the Western world, from the murder of a priest in Normandy, to the Brussels bombings, to the axe-attack on a train in Wurzburg, to the […]
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Into the Maelstrom: How the Hyperconnected Age is Tearing Us Apart
Writing during the twilight age of literature, maverick media theorist Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to the understanding of the global mass media and its effect on human behavior. He argued that by changing our sense ratios, different communication technologies altered the focus of our mental attention and affected us both on an individual and […]
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Trump’s Failure to Communicate
President Trump’s refusal to immediately disavow white nationalists and white supremacists — an ever-growing (or emerging) subset of the alt-right base — is telling. And they’ve noticed. After Trump’s comments on Charlottesville during the signing of Veteran’s Affairs legislation, a live update thread on the Daily Stormer, an alt-right white supremacist site, had this to […]
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Is Ireland Ready for Abortion?
Ireland has always been seen, along with Poland, The Philippines and Central and South America, as the heartland of Catholic belief. Despite Ireland’s official status as a democratic republic, however, the Catholic Church still wields a lot of secular power. For example, 85% of primary schools are owned and under the patronage of the Catholic […]
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Assessing Female Mate Preferences: Answers to Ten Common Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology
A few years ago, I was giving an invited presentation to an audience of mostly sociologists and family studies professors on the topic of evolution and human reproductive strategies. I mentioned that some social scientists hold false beliefs about “evolutionary psychology,” such as the mistaken assumption that evolutionary psychologists think all men are interested in […]
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Why I Still Call Myself a Feminist
Recently, many people have asked me why I still choose to identify as a feminist, especially since I dislike some of the excesses of contemporary Western feminism. I am wary of those strands of feminism which encourage young women to think of themselves primarily as powerless victims, a school of thought sometimes called “fainting couch […]
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15 Years Later, Why Do We Still Believe in the Blank Slate?
On Twitter, I once saw a cultural anthropologist refer to Steven Pinker’s toenails as “magical” when accosting an evolutionary psychologist who had angered him. Some time later, on another scroll session, I saw a sociologist and gender/ masculinity/ post-colonial theorist very politely say to another professor: “Hi Diana, I remember discussing my view that Evolutionary […]
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If Gifted Children Exist, Does a Meritocracy Still Make Sense?
The lamentable and dangerous myth persists that there is no such thing as innate talent or a gifted child. Whilst we might concede that if you are not born with the genes that will later propel you to brush the 7ft mark, then you will stand no chance of playing in the NBA, we are […]
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Sex and Gender Are Dials (Not Switches)
It has become more and more common for young people around the world to describe themselves not as a “man” or a “woman,” but as “something else.” One term for this something else is transgender. Transgender is an umbrella term for a wide variety of different identities (e.g., genderqueer, gender variant, gender fluid, gender non-conforming, hyper-feminine gay man, asexual, etc.). […]
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