Year: 2010

Paddy Doyle’s timeline of Irish Industrial Schools and failed attempts to reform them.

On NPR’s Science Friday in 1996, the rising popularity of pseudoscience and the importance of critical thinking.

We have needed Sagan ever since Copernicus removed us from the center of the universe.

Relativity has been attacked in the name of US pragmatism, German idealism, English Hegelianism, French Bergsonianism (by fellow Jew Henri Bergson!), Soviet “diamat” (dialectical materialism) and Nazi “Deutsche Physik”

Debate human nature.

Books by a superb (albeit incorrigibly centrist) reporter and a radical social critic.

Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress; fifteen died.

She was regularly beaten, left to sleep in her own urine, had her teeth knocked out, was hospitalised after a beating when she tried to break out of the orphanage.

Human rights group also wants web log writers to highlight the plight of fellow bloggers jailed for what they wrote in their online journals.

Very nasty stuff

She houses, feeds, clothes and pays for the schooling of orphans in Uganda.

Dr Mohini Giri works to rescue Indian widows from living death.

God didn’t do it, he wasn’t there at the time, and besides he’s sorry.

Article 37 of Maryland’s constitution provides that “no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God”

She rose to prominence fighting for those most easily marginalised in Africa – poor women.

Chris Bertram asks why the British left reacted the way it did.

God is silent and inert, the evidence is inadequate, and the universe is not the one predicted.

The strongly patriarchal nature of South Asian societies ensures even worse treatment for lesbians than for gay men.

Being gay in Bangladesh isn’t easy.