How Scientists Learned to Stop Deuling With E...

America's Founding Fathers feared a standing army would inevitably threaten civilian governance. Yet 250 years later, the U.S. military remains a strange outlier among nearly every nation that has ever existed—maintaining its strength and popularity while never attempting a coup. ...  Show more

Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists famously described the First Amendment as building a "wall of separation between church and State." This line has been the gold standard for those who point to the secular origins of America and the threat of funding any sort ...  Show more

"We should be humble in the face of temptations to engineer society in opposition to our instincts. Fortunately, we do not need to exercise any such authority in order to have a good life. The arc of our evolutionary history is long. But it bends toward goodness." -- Nicholas Chr ...  Show more

Irwin Shapiro is a remarkable human being by almost any standard. Following his education in physics at Cornell and Harvard, he had a job at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory working on various problems in planetary dynamics, and radar ranging, when he went to a lecture and realized that ...  Show more

Stuart Ritchie (@StuartJRitchie) is a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London and author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That- ...

To say that event A causes event B is to not only make a claim about our actual world, but about other possible worlds — in worlds where A didn't happen but everything else was the same, B would not have happened. This leads to an obvious difficulty if we want to infer causes fro ...  Show more