How Philosophy Can Reduce Your Confirmation Bias
Early in my career as a professor, I recognized confirmation bias in my students. In her evaluation of reincarnation in Buddhism, for example, one student wrote that she found it…
China and the Loneliness of Not-Knowing
Since the 1960s, psychologists and sociologists have recognized that loneliness doesn’t have much to do with being alone. As Adrian Franklin puts it, “loneliness could be experienced regardless of whether…
The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio: Book Review
Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and…
A Big Emotion is Not an Emergency: Helping Teenagers Manage Their Emotions
I learned early in my daughter’s toddler days that savvy moms don’t gasp or shriek when the baby falls and bumps herself. At playgroups, the correct response was modeled for…
The Revolutionary Nature of Intersectionality
Over the past few years, a number of platforms, including the Heterodox Academy blog, Areo and Quillette, have been publishing very perspicacious critiques of intersectionality as it is practiced today.…
Don’t Be an Indoor Cat: The Danger of Safety Culture
Too many of us are behaving like indoor cats these days. Let me explain.
A Healthy Democracy Is Always In Flux—The People Deserve Another Vote
Let me take you on a metaphorical coach journey. One hundred passengers are heading down the motorway towards Europe when, suddenly, the driver suggests taking a detour to the nostalgia-based…
Don’t Fear the Doomsday Clock
On January 25, 2018, the Doomsday Clock struck two minutes to midnight. Lawrence Krauss and Robert Rosner, members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board (which…
When Storks Bring Theybies
If you weren’t familiar with the term theyby before this headline, you can be forgiven. A theyby is a child being raised in a gender-neutral environment at the behest of…
How Post-Modern Conservatism Emerged
“Truth is not Truth” Rudy Guiliani, August 19, 2018 Introduction In an earlier article for Areo, I discussed the state of conservatism today, and argued that we are witnessing the…
Charles Darwin, Cautious Advocate of Racial Equality and Human Rights
Charles Darwin has long been recognized as one of the world’s greatest scientists and the founder of scientific biology: at the same time, and for the same reason, he has…
Eros: An Obituary
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to…
Feminist Frequency and the Truth About Video Games
Since 2013, the Feminist Frequency series Tropes vs Women has been an important voice in examining and reshaping how female characters are portrayed in video games. Featuring executive director Anita…
The Cowardice of Hollywood Self-Denunciations
You are not doing this for the sake of art; you are doing this because you want to feel relevant again. Well, guess what, there is an entire world out…
Memes and the Casual Conversation Around Mental Illness
If you’ve been on the internet for long enough, you must have seen at least one joke or meme about mental health. BuzzFeed alone seems to publish a list of…
Unhinged Martyrs for an Unhinged Culture War
Earlier this month, a flurry of tweets, an onslaught of think pieces and a blast of cable news fury have heralded the arrival of two new media martyrs, both anointed…
On Abortion: Time, Space, Error and Ethics.
Nobody wants an abortion. No woman wants one, and no man who has thought about the issue wants any woman he cares about to be in a position in which…
No, Liberal Lefties are Not Right-Wing
Left-wing liberals who are opposed to the identity politics developments on the left increasingly find ourselves accused of being right wing, referred to as “right wing” and scornfully urged to…
