Robert Wright's Nonzero

Bob: Beware of anti-Trump neocons ... How Bill Kristol helped create Trumpism ... Are neocons using Trump to rehabilitate themselves? ... Dan: The Trump foreign policy team excels at incompetence ... Trying to not overreact to the Troll-in-Chief ... Is it time to get alarmed about war with North Korea? ...

Cullen’s new book about the heyday of the funny pages, Cartoon County ... What it was like to grow up as the child of a cartoonist ... Artists who were politically liberal and culturally conservative ... An idyllic white world created for a quasi-idyllic time ... No belly-buttons, no male nipples ... How Cullen took over writing Prince Valiant—and how that shaped his subsequent writing ...

The pervasiveness of sexual harassment ... Human nature according to Socrates, the Google memo guy, and Bob ... Are gendered behavioral differences innate or learned? ... John: Scientists keep trying, and failing, to discern the roots of human behavior ... Can you be both enlightened—in the Buddhist sense—and immoral ... Sexual harassment in science and philosophy ...

John continues to ruffle the feathers of scientists and philosophers ... Concepts of consciousness, from pure materialism to panpsychism ... John: The solipsism problem will keep the mind-body problem problematic ... Daniel Dennett’s inordinate aversion to mystery ... John gives us the plot spoiler about his book-in-progress ... Bob thought he had Dan Dennett cornered. But then… ... Are we in a simulation? Perish the thought, says John ...

Bob and Judith try to rank the sexual predators in terms of badness, from Harvey Weinstein on down ... Male power in all its variety ... Are we entering a neo-Victorian era? ... Why understanding isn't forgiveness ... Stepping down in disgrace as a career move ... After the purge, will women finally feel at home in the workplace? ... Bob and Judith share their own experiences with workplace sexual harassment ...

Pondering free will before Thanksgiving’s excesses ... Shaun: Determinism is too complicated to be intuitive ... The benefits of blame ... Is “free” will just a matter of semantics? ... What game theory experiments tell us about moralistic anger ... Shaun: It’s okay to use determinism to forgive yourself ... Do the “uncaused effects” of quantum physics bear on the free will question? ...

Betsy’s work on prejudice and conflict earns her a MacArthur “Genius” grant ... Betsy: Media tells us what other people think ... Across tribal divides in Rwanda, even gifts can be malicious ... How social media algorithms control consciousness ... How peer “influencers” can make schools safer (and kinder) ...

Why transhumanists want to escape their biological prisons ... The “singularity” and the culture of Silicon Valley ... How biohackers turn technology into performance art ... How do you upload an immaterial mind? ... Over-the-counter life extension: does it work? ...

Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, 500 years later ... Luther was very hard on himself, and the consequences were huge ... Why Luther’s sermons went viral in 16th-century Germany ... Luther’s mark on future Protestant denominations ... The Diet of Worms and its improbably dramatic aftermath ... Why did Prince Frederick III of Saxony protect Luther? ...

Does science lead to a decline in religious belief? ... Before academia lost its religion ... Surveying the global rise of religious nationalism ... Are evolution and religion truly incompatible? ... Allowing for miracles in a materialist world ... How Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” begs the question ...