Robert Wright's Nonzero

Bob and Josh recount their first meeting after a silent meditation retreat ... Does yoga always have a spiritual component? ... How Josh’s yoga practice prepares the body for meditation ... How yoga’s focus on breath can lead to the body ... Solutions to modern distraction ... Bob: Mindfulness practice can erode essentialist thinking ... What’s the point of Bob’s Mindful Resistance Project? ... The present and future of the Mindful Resistance Newsletter ...

Darwin’s approach to explaining the peacock’s cumbersome plumage ... Could beauty have evolved, in part, for beauty’s sake? ... The sense in which traits favored via mate selection may not be ‘adaptive’ ... Mate preference and aesthetics ... What can we learn from ducks’ miserable sex lives? ... How paternal investment in offspring became part of human life ... When sex isn’t for reproduction ... Richard’s misgivings about evolutionary psychology ...

Is the NYT Op-Ed page serving the public discourse? ... Andrew: Quality of argument matters more than the identity of the speaker ... How Trump and identity politics reinforce each other ... Andrew is irritated by the idea of an "LBGTQ community" ... Bob: Evolutionary psychology isn't right-wing ... The opioid epidemic and America's hidden pain ... Floating the idea of "meta-conservatism" ...

Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think ... Galen explains panpsychism ... What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean? ... Is human consciousness epiphenomenal? ... Do physical laws come from somewhere? ... Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?) ... Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago ...

If Bob and Greg can’t bridge America’s tribal divide, who can? ... One cure for tribalism ... How tribalism triumphs over ideology ... Is Trump crazy like a fox, or just crazy? ... Greg: Identity politics is "nothing but division" ... Does language policing help Trump? ... Fox News in the scheme of things ...

David: Strong national spirit is wonderful so long as it’s inclusive ... Trump makes liberals rethink their suspicion of the intelligence community ... David: Party loyalties may not withstand this century’s unique problems ... Why Trump's seeming ambivalence about domestic abuse allegations could drive off moderate Republicans for good ... David’s new book, Trumpocracy, surveys Trump’s damage to the American Republic ...

Ann's new book on child prodigies, Off the Charts ... Will a child prodigy become an adult non-prodigy? ... The cautionary tale of Bobby Fischer ... The prodigy's "adolescent crisis" ... How people misunderstood Amy Chua, the "Tiger Mom" ... The insanity of the college admissions gauntlet ... Child prodigies inspire sympathy. Their parents? Not so much. ...

Matt: Why I resigned from Newsweek ... Why is the Manhattan DA investigating Newsweek's parent company? ... Populism, polarization, and page views ... The lost world of the dominant newsweekly ... Henry Luce's hidden editorializing at Time ... Can the newsweekly’s original mission be realized in the digital age? ...

How Jeff went from science journalist to meditation teacher ... Jeff’s new book, co-authored with Dan Harris: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics ... How ADD and bipolar tendencies shaped Jeff's practice ... The life-changing experience of falling out of a tree while on mushrooms ... The interaction between mindfulness, not-self, and suffering ... Jeff takes a stab at defining enlightenment ... The varieties of consciousness ... How meditation can shift your priorities ...

Unpacking the name of Max’s new podcast, Moderate Rebels ... Max contends that James Wolcott’s “alt-left” doesn’t exist ... Where do lefties stand on Russia? ... Why Max doubts the DNC leaks swung the 2016 election ... How Vice’s hip branding “normalizes American empire” ... Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, etc.: Max's ideological taxonomy of media sites ...