I'm applauding the cover story of the October 9, 2006 edition of Time: "What Makes Us Different?" [The quick answer is that, out of 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, only 1.23% are different than those found in the chimpanzee genome]. The writers based this article solely on the expert…
This is a companion piece to “The Magazines of Wal-Mart.” In that post (and now in this post) I put on my amateur anthropologist hat and explored the range of reading materials made available to consumers by America’s largest retailer.
I traveled to a Wal-Mart superstore yesteday to check out the types of books for sale. Why? Because Wal-Mart serves as a culture filter to the many people who don’t take the extra effort to shop for books at bona fide book stores. For those people who select their books from the limited offerings of Wal-Mart, here is the full range of written materials with which they are fertilizing their minds. Here is how they prepare their minds to deal with important things such as parenthood, justice, the practices of other cultures, the meaning of life and how to vote.
The book section of the St. Louis area Wal-Mart I visited consists of five large sections of shelves. The three inside sections consist entirely of fiction; most of those titles are romance novels. Here are some of the fiction titles you can buy at Wal-Mart:
Such fiction works constitute 60% of the titles made available by Wal-Mart.
If you are one of those people who wants to buy a “Best Seller,” you would need to check out the first section of book shelves (the left-most). But don’t expect to see any of the following books, each of which is currently ranked within the top 15 books on the …
Check out this post called "Turning Away Anger," by Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism. This post is a good collection of the sorts of abuse one can expect whenever one publicly expresses doubt that supernatural beings exist. He gives lots of examples. [T]here is a huge amount of anger seething and fuming among…
I noticed this quote at Freedom from Religion Foundation: “The God of the Christians is a father who is a great deal more concerned about his apples than he is about his children.” -- Diderot, French writer, philosopher (1713-1784), Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, c. 1762 FFRF is a site that…
All forms of birth control are immoral, according to many Christian conservatives. We’ve previously written about this absurd position here and here. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on a formal conservative effort to prohibit all forms of birth control: Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement's success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal…