Author: Adam Lee

At long last, spring is in sight. Time to celebrate the season and usher in warmer weather with something upbeat, and I’ve got just the thing: Fitz & the Tantrums, an infectiously catchy soul-pop hybrid from L.A. Like Of Monsters and Men, another of my favorites, they trade off between male and female vocalists (in…

Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, The Movie These past few weeks, we’ve been discussing why the first Atlas Shrugged movie flopped so badly at the box office. I’ve argued that it failed to appeal to hardcore Objectivists, at least in part, because its script disastrously depicts its capitalist heroes and socialist villains as normal human beings,…

I’m greatly enjoying the new Cosmos, but there are those who are none too pleased by it. Some of the critics are too laughable to take seriously, like the creationists who’re whining about not getting equal time. Then there are the ones who represent an allegedly more sophisticated theology, like this post by Andrew Sullivan,…

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Episode 4, “A Sky Full of Ghosts” Any science show faced with time constraints has to strike a balance between breadth and depth. The process of science is always laborious and not always interesting; but if you don’t show it at all, it leaves the impression that the results just dropped…

Last week, the giant Christian charity World Vision announced that they were changing their rules to permit the hiring of employees in same-sex marriages. As an explicitly Christian organization, World Vision requires its employees to be Christian and to obey a code of conduct which includes no sex outside marriage, and they weren’t changing either…

Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, The Movie Part of the problem confronting any film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged is the sheer ponderous scale of the book. It includes loads and loads of characters, giant weighty speeches, and many minor asides that become important plot elements later. A 100% faithful adaptation would have to be impossibly long…

Several months ago, I reported on an article by Dr. Karen Stollznow that laid out her experience of sexism within the skeptical community, alleging years of on-the-job sexual harassment by a colleague. Soon after her article was published, CFI’s Benjamin Radford was accused, though not by Stollznow, of being that colleague. I’d heard rumblings that…

As I mentioned in an earlier post, David Silverman of American Atheists incited a firestorm when he said at CPAC this year that there was a secular argument against abortion rights. He’s not the only one: Disappointingly, my Patheos colleague Friendly Atheist gave a platform to an anti-choice atheist earlier this month and then declined…

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Episode 3, “When Knowledge Conquered Fear” I wrote that last week’s episode felt overstuffed, trying to cover a vast amount of territory in just 45 minutes of TV. This one did much better in that regard. The writing was tightly focused, telling a central story that wove throughout the episode, and…

My latest column is now up on AlterNet, Neil deGrasse Tyson Shows Why Small-Minded Religious Fundamentalists Are Threatened by Wonders of Universe. It’s about the new Cosmos TV series, and its reminder that those who advocate new ideas have always met fierce violent resistance from the credulous masses and the elite guardians of popular orthodoxy,…