I experience this feeling quite often, perhaps one out of every thing times that I'm driving. I've never given in to the urge, but I have spent a lot of time worrying over why I'd be experiencing such a self-destructive impulse.

But surely we are permitted to hazard a guess, informed as we are by his behavior? (I certainly agree that the hypothesis that he himself is gay shouldn't be linked to his homophobia.)

Ah — a hobbyhorse of yours, then. Whatever misreadings of science may be found in other articles, I still think it's the case here that the author was being entirely ironic.

Yes — but then, the author's being ironic, no? The old hyperbolic trope of "If you knew anything about..."

This. The Katie Baker asks, "How come Austen's popularity continues to climb?", and then dismisses a fact which seems to me to explain most of Austen's popularity: "it goes without saying that Austen is way wittier and more talented than her modern day counterparts." It's her writing ability — her wit and talent with…

Feel free to suggest more for the list.

I found myself thinking the same thing while reading this article.

This is a conversation a number of people involved in secular activism (and community organizing among secular people) are having. Some folks think it's important, others think it less of a priority, but there you are. I've been collating all the responses I can find, at…

I did not think that.

Melanie, are you yourself Christian? I ask because it seems odd you would not have mentioned Hyatt's Christian perspective. If you yourself were Christian, you might (I am supposing) not have realized how off-putting this perspective is to non-Christian or nontheistic readers. (For the same reason, a fish doesn't…

When teaching poetry, I've unpacked the lexical, phonetic, semantic, and conventional formal features of a couplet, using just as much diagram spaghetti and Greek.

Sigh. To ask just one question after an important distinction the author fails to make:

Are you taking into account Pessimippopotamus' concern that a revised orthography would eliminate much of the information about semantic relatedness and etymology which at present is encoded in (often irregular or non-phonemic) spelling?

One of the other things you'd lose is the rich lode of information about linguistic relationships embedded into the received spelling of words. In a phonetic spelling scheme, cognates which have diverged phonologically would be spelled differently, eliminating clues about their semantic relatedness which play an…

As I wrote earlier, I'll be holding on to my Sniffex stock, thank you.

"Laci Green completely alienated all of her Muslim (and, I suppose Mormon) viewers."

I hardly think this is going to replace the Sniffex in MY security screening process.

"On the contrary, the entire notion that an intelligent program may run on different substrates with indistinguishable behavior relies explicitly on physicalism being true and dualism being false, and it remains the default position without any unnecessary metaphysical assumptions. One may assume that there is…

Perhaps we want a lay public which is more literate, rather than a legislature which is less, aseElected officials are there to serve the interests of the electorate, not to execute their (the electorate's) orders.

Time was, when it wasn't uncommon practice for newspapers of all sizes to supplement their own original content with material lifted or remixed from other sources. Of course, it doesn't follow from "this is how things used to be done" that "this is how things should be done now."