Author: Adam Lee

My wife and I spent the last week on vacation in Iceland, which is like a liberal’s dream: an peaceful, egalitarian society with no standing army, very low inequality and scarcely any crime, consistently ranked as one of the best countries in the world for women and LGBT people, with a Scandinavian-style social welfare system…

I got back from Iceland yesterday and I’m still catching up on news that happened while I was away. Here are a few of the stories from my backlog: • More to come on this, but for now I’ll just mention it briefly: a very welcome joint statement by Richard Dawkins and Ophelia Benson denouncing…

[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from March 2013.] Way back in 2011, I wrote about the hilarious box-office trainwreck (see what I did there?) that was Atlas Shrugged: Part I. Inexplicably, Ayn Rand’s dense, multi-hour soliloquies in defense of capitalism failed to…

[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from November 2010.] I was reading this outstanding essay by Alom Shaha, an atheist and ex-Muslim of Bangladeshi descent, who describes what it’s like to come out as a nonbeliever in a tightly-knit, intensely religious community. But…

[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from January 2012.] As I’ve often mentioned, religion has a set of cognitive tricks – unconscious ideas, prejudices and habits of thought it tries to instill in believers – which shield their minds against contrary argument and…

[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from November 2008.] If you search the internet, it’s not hard to find New Agers and others who think that the dawning of the age of reason was a mistake. They envision a more “holistic” approach, one…

[Author’s Note: I’m reposting some old favorites while I’m away on vacation this week. This post was originally from June 2009.] For those who are grieving, for those who mourn, and for all those who are burdened with the weary weight of sorrow, I have a prescription. Find a quiet, peaceful place, a green field…

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter III When she hears that Hank Rearden and Ken Danagger have been indicted for illegally doing business, Dagny rushes to Pittsburgh. For reasons she can’t fully explain, she’s certain that Danagger will be the next to vanish, and she’s desperate to reach him and convince him to stay before he’s…

[Content note: This post contains obscene and sexist language that I wouldn’t normally allow on my site. Consider yourself advised.] I wrote in May about the “men’s rights activists” – a tribe of angry misogynists who, despite the name, have no interest in actual issues of justice that affect men but only want an excuse…

Hemant wrote about a story I also wanted to mention: the Freedom from Religion Foundation has written a letter of complaint to the city government of Miami Beach, Florida, demanding the dismantling of Orthodox Jewish eruvin on public property. An eruv is a Jewish ritual boundary made of string or wire, stretched between objects such…