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People who don't obsess over sports often have what psychologists call lower tribal instincts. Their identity isn't as strongly tied to being part of a group. They're more individualistic. They're more likely to say, "I don't need to belong to something bigger to feel complete." And there's actual research on this. A…
Luther thought the result of his movement to reform the Roman Catholic Church would be what came to be called “the priesthood of all believers,” the sixteenth-century equivalent of Zuckerberg’s “global community.” In practice, the Protestant Reformation produced more than a century of bloody religious conflict. This…
The first thing I noticed was that I suddenly lacked an outlet for the compulsion not to write.1 It wasn’t news to me that I used social media for procrastination purposes, but without it, I found myself lacking an easy source for distractions. It dawned on me that I’d mostly stopped visiting websites directly and…
These two articles reflect some religious disquiet at the prospect of contact with ETI. When faced with an alien civilization of enormous powers and the likelihood that they are not even approximately human, the differences that divide us on Earth are likely to seem increasingly trivial and irrelevant. At least for…