THE YALE REVIEW (March 11, 2025): The latest issue features a central folio, “What Was AI?,” exploring artificial intelligence through essays from Lauren Oyler, Christopher Sorrentino, and Melanie Mitchell. The issue also includes new memoirs and essays from Annie Ernaux and Namwali Serpell, alongside a visual portfolio by Vera Molnár.
PRI, in celebration of America’s 250th birthday, has produced a series of videos and supplemental lesson plans for teachers highlighting the achievements of some of this country’s, and California’s, in particular, greatest unsung heroes. Three of my favorites have been compiled in the pages that follow. The first profiles one of my heroes, Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Another features R.C. Hoiles, a free-market newspaper publisher whose son-in-law Dick Wallace served on the PRI board until his recent passing. Hoiles, a great defender of liberty, built a large group of newspapers around the country including the popular Orange County Register.
And we also honor Sarah Josepha Hale, a poet, author, and visionary force in American culture. She championed Thanksgiving until it became a national tradition and holiday. Through her magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, she helped to shape American tastes from beloved recipes to the white wedding dress.
We founded Skeptic magazine and the Skeptics Society in 1992, partially in response to a market demand from consumers and the media for a scientific and rational response to increasingly tantalizing claims of the paranormal and supernatural, ESP and Psi, telepathy and telekinesis, NDEs and OBEs, ghosts and poltergeists, astrology and psychics, cryptozoology and strange creatures, haunted houses and mysterious places, UFOs and aliens, conspiracy theories and cults, and a litany of anomalous psychological experiences people reported.
I’m a humanistic weirdo, and as such I’m not sure where I belong in this modern culture war. I love truth and reason — I’ve built a career on them — but I belong to a humanistic tradition that refuses to stop at the head and leave the heart out of it. And these days there aren’t many of us. So when I look at the people we’ve come to call “anti-woke intellectuals”—many of whom have written for Skeptic or appeared as guests on The Michael Shermer Show podcast—I don’t see them the way either side wants me to.
By invoking the American Revolution, twentieth-century anticolonial figures connected their project with the movement for civil rights in the United States. Adom Getachew
Would we be better off living in the Middle Ages? Astonishingly, influential voices on the American intellectual Right now seem to think so. Rather than affirming the Enlightenment ideals that inspired this country’s founding—reason, rights, markets, liberal democracy, and church–state separation—they are longing for, of all things, rule from the throne and altar. Last October …
On the 200th anniversary of his death on July 4, 1826, and the 250th anniversary of his Declaration of Independence, we need Thomas Jefferson now more than ever. We especially need his progressive views on the severance of church from state by a “wall of separation.” We in the United States live in troubling times …
The question confronting American educators today is not whether we should teach ethics to children—virtually everyone agrees that moral education is essential. The question is how we should teach ethics in an increasingly diverse society where traditional religious approaches no longer work for everyone. I believe we need to fundamentally rethink our approach to moral …
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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