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Jun 6, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Christopher Snowdon |Doriane Lambelet Coleman |Allan Stratton |Jerry A. Coyne
NOTE: This essay is an excerpt from a new introduction to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which will be published by the Institute of Economic Affairs on 8 June to mark the novel’s 75thanniversary. As autumn of 1948 turned into winter on the windswept island of Jura, the man who was born Eric Blair sat in bed banging away on a decrepit typewriter, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Doriane Lambelet Coleman |Allan Stratton |Jerry A. Coyne |Maarten Boudry
In recent years, progressives who work on sex and gender have coalesced in support of two related goals. Mainly, they want society to accept, and the law to treat as equals, people who don’t conform to gender norms. That’s goal one, and it’s immediate and practical. Goal two is ideological. It’s a society that’s blind to sex. Only certain progressives are committed to this second goal, but the answer to the question “What is sex?” from progressive advocacy is informed by the ideas embedded in both.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Allan Stratton |Jerry A. Coyne |Maarten Boudry |Julia Friedman
The Mad Max franchise is one of the more improbable successes in Hollywood history. It began in 1979 as an original, one-off, low-budget exploitation flick written, directed, and produced by first timers. The cast were no-name locals from a country on the other side of the world, and it featured an anti-hero who arrives at a bleak conclusion devoid of salvation or redemption.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Jerry A. Coyne |Maarten Boudry |Julia Friedman |Paul Berman
In this episode of the Quillette podcast, I talk to veteran technology journalist and statistician Timandra Harkness, author of Big Data: Does Size Matter? about her latest book, Technology Is Not the Problem. We discuss a wide variety of situations in which personalised technology is changing our lives, ranging from the ways in which 3D printing is revolutionising fashion to the AI bots that are changing the nature of dating.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Jerry A. Coyne |Maarten Boudry |Julia Friedman |Paul Berman
Like being struck by lightning, getting deplatformed—first invited to speak and then disinvited for your political views—is something you assume happens only to other people. But, unlike a lightning strike, it’s not a rare occurrence. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s ” of US universities lists 626 successful deplatforming attempts since 1998. This year alone, there have already been 110 attempts to cancel talks, most involving speakers sympathetic to Israel.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Anwesh Satpathy |Jerry A. Coyne |Maarten Boudry |Julia Friedman
On 22 January, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the consecration of a grand Ram Temple in Ayodhya. A little over thirty years ago, the spot on which the temple now stands was the site of a medieval mosque built under the rule of the Mughal emperor Babur. The site was the focus of a centuries-long dispute between Muslims and Hindus, thanks to claims that the mosque had been built on top of a destroyed Ram temple.
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Jan 23, 2024 | 
chicagomaroon.com | Jerry A. Coyne
Has the time come to ask whether the activism of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) belongs on our campus? It’s not the morally reprehensible things they say that brings this question to the fore, as their speech is protected, but how they behave: in a way that violates campus rules and disrupts the University’s mission. One thing I’ve absorbed in my 37 years at this University is that no matter how detestable speech can be, it should never be banned or suppressed.
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Jul 3, 2023 | 
pensar.org | Jerry A. Coyne |Luana Maroja
RESUMEN: La biología enfrenta una grave amenaza de las políticas “progresistas” que están cambiando la forma en que se realiza nuestro trabajo, delimitando áreas de la biología que son tabú y no serán financiadas por el gobierno ni publicadas en revistas científicas, estipulando qué palabras deben evitar los biólogos en su redacción, y decretando cómo se enseña biología a los estudiantes y se comunica a otros científicos y al público a través de la prensa técnica y popular.
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Jun 20, 2023 | 
skepticalinquirer.org | Jerry A. Coyne |Luana Maroja
SUMMARY: Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press.
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May 3, 2023 | 
chron.com | Jonathan B. Losos |Jerry A. Coyne
- - - My view, and that of many other die-hard cat lovers, is that the internet exists primarily to circulate pictures and videos of cats. Dogs, you may be surprised to learn, can also be found on the internet but curiously tend to remain stuck in remote corners of cyberspace. Cats fuel wildly viral memes; dogs seldom get beyond that family vacation picture on Facebook (with just three likes, all from elderly relatives).
