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Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…et is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various participants bring to…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…that happened over a twelve month period in my family’s life (as well as a number of flashbacks from when I was a young boy). In addition, there were a number of things I didn’t get the chance to explore for a very practical reason: I had a deadline. Working in publishing I’m very conscious about how important deadlines are. Writers need to make those deadlines and because I worked in the industry I wanted to be respectful about that. There were a…

The Avengers, Rogue Roombas, and Robot Accountability

By Hilary Ledwell and Michael Schulson

…the kind of thing that is a dog. If we have cute robot butlers, studies at MIT have shown that folks with less empathy are less likely to have a problem kicking them, even if the cute little bots are fine regardless. That still seems to be a different issue than saving AI souls though, which is also totally fascinating, both for what it says about AI and what it says about evangelicals. MHS: Or what it says about the capacity of certain pastors to…

Atheist Scientists in Church

By Paul Wallace

…written by Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. The occasion for the article is the release of Hutchinson’s new book. In Monopolizing Knowledge, Hutchinson engages scientism, which he defines as “the belief that science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge.” This erroneous view, held by many inside and outside the sciences, “is at least indirectly responsible for the apparent fricti…

Capricology: Tattoos, Blood, Cyber-Dating

By Anthea Butler

…bodies/brains have been preserved by means of cryonics. Through my time at MIT, I met many Extropians, some of whom believed that their future lay in the capacity to download large chunks of human memory and consciousness into machines so that the best of human thought would live beyond the life span of their “meat” bodies and would be able to continue to function as a resource in the future. Of course, I rarely met an Extropian who did not think…

Devil’s Bookmark: Atheism for Smarties

By Bernard Schweizer

…ht-knit community of the Valdeners. Faced with the decision of leaving for MIT or becoming the new Rebbe of his archaic Jewish community, he choses the latter, well knowing that thereby he choses existential loneliness. Faced with the question “why should the Valdeners continue with their superstitions and their insularity and their stubborn refusal to learn anything from outside? Why is that something to perpetuate?” the future Rebbe answers: “It…

Women of Opus Dei Explain “True Feminism”

By Kate Childs Graham

…ngly, many mothers featured are graduates of ranking universities—Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, to name a few. Jane Reckart, a Stanford grad and stay-at-home mom, remarks on how Opus Dei helped her along to way to motherhood: …I was caught unprepared for how debilitating pregnancy would be for me. I was sick, listless, and depressed for months with each pregnancy. I never would have had more than one or maybe two children if I hadn’t learned from St…

The End of My Line: It’s Okay to Embrace The ‘Covid Baby Bust’

By Monica Byrne

…es I wanted. And I can see them in the life I’ve lived so far: studying at MIT, interning at NASA, working a research vessel in the Atlantic, and then leaving it all behind to become a writer. Shortly after getting my IUD, I made a new chart, this one of all the places I wanted to go. There’s only one column, labeled “Destination.” It includes Vietnam, Peru, Jordan, Sri Lanka, Cuba, and Ireland. My life doesn’t feel long enough to possibly go to a…

You Are More Than Your Brain: A Revolutionary Theory of Consciousness

By John Stoehr

…s a poor indicator. Take the fact of Kismet, a robot engineered at MIT to imitate a range of human attitudes and emotions. The result is a convincing simulacrum of social exchange between a nonthinking and nonfeeling robot and students who were very much thinking and feeling. So what proof is valid proof? “If what people say and do, and measurements of what their brains are doing, are the best we have to go on,” Noë writes, “then it would seem tha…

Dear Governor Kasich, Will You Come Lead My Passover Seder?

By Michael Schulson

…r at New York magazine, Jonathan Chait compared your question to “visiting MIT, wandering into a physics lab, and asking people if they ever heard of this guy named Isaac Newton.” Why is Chait being so harsh? Interfaith dialogue is hard. (Really, it is!). I’ll admit that when I watch the video, I get the sense that you’re not so much lecturing the Jewish scholars as performing for people who may watch the video later. You’re letting them know that…