Author: Adam Lee

Last week, there was a powerful magnitude 8.3 earthquake in Chile near the city of Illapel. The tremors were felt as far as São Paulo, 1,600 miles away, and triggered tsunami warnings throughout the Pacific, from Hawaii to Japan to New Zealand. If you didn’t hear about this quake, there’s a reason for that: in…

Pope Francis’s visit to the U.S. this week is generating reams of breathless, anticipatory coverage. But all the media excitement can’t change that there are severe, long-run problems for the church that are already having an impact, and that a papal red-carpet tour isn’t going to fix. One of those big problems is the aging and…

Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter II I’ve mentioned the missing women of Atlas Shrugged, but there’s another omission that’s even bigger. Although the men far outnumber the women, we have Dagny as a main character, plus there are a few other women to provide representation, unequal as it is. However, there’s a hole that has…

As PZ brought to my attention, Sam Harris is still arguing for racially profiling airline passengers. His argument in the video is that security is a “zero-sum game”, that our screeners have limited time and resources, and so they should focus on the people whom we know are more likely to be terrorists, by which…

In a milestone, the California legislature approved an assisted-dying bill last week. Gov. Jerry Brown hasn’t said if he’ll sign it, but if he does, the state would become the fifth and by far the largest to allow doctors to prescribe life-ending medication. Like its counterpart laws in Oregon, Washington and Vermont, the California version…

If you’re not reading the comments on my Atlas Shrugged posts, you’re missing half the fun. Commenter Sneezeguard’s excellent “Cobra Commander Dialogues” have brought a whole host of supervillains flocking to Galt’s Gulch, including Doctor Doom (in three parts so far!) and even the ghost of Stalin. But the latest post has spawned one of…

Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter II Last time, John Galt told Dagny that while she was living in the capitalists’ valley, she could attend concerts or plays, just not his super-secret physics lectures. She takes him up on that suggestion: [S]he sat among rows of benches under the open sky, watching Kay Ludlow on the…

Although the vast majority of American local officials are issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, there are a few stubborn bigots determined to hold out. In the state of Kentucky, 3 out of 120 county clerks are still refusing to comply, including the most notorious, Rowan County clerk Kim Davis. After repeatedly losing her appeals…

Laziness is a good thing. For as long as civilization has existed, people have been trying to live as well as possible with as little work as possible. That drive has created kings and kleptocrats who get rich by robbing their subjects, but it’s also led to every technology that makes work easier, from horse…

In spite of all the damage we’ve done, our impact on the earth is more evanescent than you might imagine. I’m fascinated by books like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us or Jonathan Waldman’s Rust: The Longest War, which describe how all the artifacts of our civilization would dissolve and disappear without human beings to…