I’m having trouble seeing how outlawing nude dancing will cut down on crime but legislators in Iceland just passed a law that does just that. (side question: how much strip-teasing is there in Iceland? I mean I know there is summer but aren’t winters really really cold?). The idea is that strip-teases encourage prostitution trafficking [...]

It occurs to me that if I’m going to do a series of blog posts to tell people about Buddhism, I should write one as a general introduction to Buddhism.  I probably should have posted that one first, but I didn’t, so I’ll do it today instead. Disclaimer: I want to clarify that I’m not [...]

Louis Menand at The New Yorker describes a growing critique of the field of psychiatry: The position behind much of the skepticism about the state of psychiatry is that it’s not really science. “Cultural, political, and economic factors, not scientific progress, underlie the triumph of diagnostic psychiatry and the current ‘scientific’ classification of mental illness [...]

Vice President Joe Biden may have whispered to President Obama today that the healthcare bill he was about to sign into law was a “big fucking deal.” Not two hours later t-shirts were made. It’s just another sign of how fast things move thanks to the internet. –Jasper Hart

At the risk of preaching to the choir hear I want to highlight this argument of the value of blogs by Alan Jacobs: To say that a magazine, or a set of magazines, or even a series of blogs are the chief instruments of your intellectual formation is not — or should not be — [...]

Last night I attended a talk by Suraiya Essack-Verachia on the Islamic headscarf (the talk was hosted by the Muslim Students’ Association – the other MSA – during their Islamic Awareness Week). Her goal was to disabuse her non-Muslim audience of their various prejudices about the headscarf, or hijab – for instance, that it is [...]