Robert Wright's Nonzero

Will's new book Doing Good Better and its topic, effective altruism ... A shockingly cheap and easy way to help schools in Africa ... The perils of pursuing only the quantifiably good ... The case against buying fair trade products and donating to disaster relief ... Long-term do-good planning ... Why it makes sense to invest in apocalypse prevention even though we'll probably be fine ...

Melanie Brewster and other Atheists in America ... Can atheism be a source of community? ... What about hope, consolation and wonder? ... Melanie's book and why it was originally titled The Other Closet ... Why do New Atheists tend to be white, male and angry? ... Are atheists understudied? ...

The fractured evangelical vote ... State of the evangelical mind (with a cameo by Sarah's dog Karma) ... The trajectory of Sarah's relationship with Judaism ... Journalistic work as a source of pleasure and meaning ... Mourning without the consolation of an afterlife ... Hillary's brand of liberal Christianity ...

A "higher purpose" that doesn’t involve spooky forces ... What does it matter whether a higher purpose exists? ... What does the “meaning” in “meaning of life” mean? ... Pondering the trajectory of human development ... The importance of understanding other perspectives ... Debating whether we’ve made moral progress ...

What do we mean by a meaningful life? ... Finding purpose in being a part of something bigger ... How social context determines our understanding of meaning ... Fantasies about uniting humanity: one cause, one God, one reality ... Are we making moral progress? ... Is it empowering or terrifying to think we create our own meaning? ...

Finding meaning in Washington D.C. ... Heather’s spiritual life ... Ways Episcopalians think about God ... Tempting things public servants should avoid ... The importance of being hokey ... “There is no having it all” ...

Brainpickings.org: How an unsettled 22-year-old's office newsletter evolved into a meaning-of-life resource ... Honorable relationships in the age of transactional networking ... Fruitful monotony versus compulsive consumption of media ... Choosing understanding over judgment ... Maria's spiritual routine: reading, writing and meditation ... Success as freedom from contentification and commercialization ...

Jeremy's new theory and the origins of life ... Wrestling with the second law of thermodynamics ... Self-organizing systems and self-replicating ones ... Natural selection as a special case of more general physical laws ... The role of ritual in Jeremy’s Jewish faith ... The laws of physics were written by people, not God ...

Jesus, Buddha, Roger and Paul: friends in conversation ... How do you say "nirvana" in Christian? ... The perennial philosophy ... Religious pluralism as a political imperative ... Why Paul will not live for eternity (and Roger will) ... When Christian mysticism feels pretty Buddhist ...

Buddhism in a nutshell ... The meaning of life according to Tibetan Buddhism ... The key to liberation ... Talking about tantra ... If science is power, what happens to religion? ... What does renunciation mean for Buddhists? ...