Author: Adam Lee

The true story of the librarians who risked their lives to rescue a priceless cultural heritage from the destructive rampage of Islamist fundamentalism.

The world is really and truly flattening the curve of climate change. Although we can’t stop global warming entirely, we still have a chance to mitigate its effects.

Religion exemplifies the dichotomy of the human spirit: the same churches that gave birth to uplifting philosophies and great works of art are also guilty of horrendous crimes against humanity.

Does anyone have to be poor? Or is the ongoing existence of poverty a choice we make? In 2021, the world’s population was 7.9 billion people. Over the same time period, the gross world product (GWP)—the sum total of all human economic activity—was around $87 trillion. This figure encompasses vast inequality, everyone from yacht-owning billionaires…

What would the United States look like if it were led according to secular values? Although the US was founded as a secular nation, Christianity has always wielded disproportionate influence on our politics. How would our laws be different if nonreligious people held one-third of congressional seats, proportional to our share of the population? Secular…

When I was a boy first studying history outside American textbooks, the United Kingdom was at first an image of pomp and period drama, not so alien to the lovers of high end film and television but exotic and mystic to her North American descendants in its antiquity. As I became more experienced in the…

Sometimes, tearing a statue down conveys a more potent history lesson than leaving it in place.

The twenty-first century has been one bitter pill after another for those who believe in the goodness of humanity. Is it still possible to be a humanist in a world in shadow?

I can’t say for sure where my tendencies towards depression and extreme emotional responses to change first came; my grandmother has dealt with the same in her life, as well as the compulsive need to take a look at charities and noble causes. I know mental issues like this can be heritable to the point…

Earlier this month, I wrote an essay against degrowth, the position that drastic reductions to the modern lifestyle are our only hope of saving the planet. I argued that, to the contrary, renewable energy promises a future of greater abundance even as we tread more lightly on the Earth. It’s the very rare case where…