Point of Inquiry
650 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 days ago - ★★★★★ - 758 ratingsPoint of Inquiry is the Center for Inquiry's flagship podcast, where the brightest minds of our time sound off on all the things you're not supposed to talk about at the dinner table: science, religion, and politics.
Guests have included Brian Greene, Susan Jacoby, Richard Dawkins, Ann Druyan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugenie Scott, Adam Savage, Bill Nye, and Francis Collins.
Point of Inquiry is produced at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y.
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Episodes
J.R. Havlan - Writer for The Daily Show
January 28, 2014 21:56 - 30 minutes - 13.8 MBThis week Point of Inquiry discusses satire in politics and American life with J.R. Havlan, eight-time Emmy Award winning writer on The Daily Show. J.R. was previously a stand-up comic, including a stint doing crowd warm-up for Politically Incorrect which led to writing jokes for that show's monologues. He's also co-author of the New York Times best-selling books America: The Book, Earth: The Book, and wrote for the 2006 and 2008 Academy Awards. Most recently, J.R. began his own podcast call...
Jason Stanley - Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy?
January 21, 2014 15:18 - 33 minutes - 15.4 MBThis week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and co-author of a provocative essay in last week’s New York Times entitled Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy? Dr. Stanley and his co-author, Dr. Vesla Weaver, argue that the disproportionate surveillance, imprisonment, and post-conviction voter disenfranchisement of black Americans threatens the very integrity of our democracy. On any given day, 5.85 million people are unable to vote because they a...
Arthur Caplan, PhD - Ethics of Brain Death, end of life, the State and the Right
January 14, 2014 17:50 - 34 minutes - 19.8 MBThis week Point of Inquiry is discussing Death. Specifically, Brain death and the efforts of some areas of the religious right and their attempts to eliminate whole brain Brain Death as the legal standard for death in America. To aid in that,Lindsay Beyerstein welcomes, head of the division of bioethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center, Arthur Caplan, PhD. Dr. Caplan is the author of 32 books and over 600 papers on bioethics as well as a Fellow of the American Association f...
Chris Emden - Hip Hop Archivist and Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University
January 06, 2014 18:35 - 37 minutes - 17 MBThis week on Point of Inquiry we welcome Chris Emden, a Columbia Professor who's helped design New York City's public school policy, a leading science education researcher, and Harvard Hip Hop Archive Fellow. Chris Emden is a favored guest of Josh Zepps on Huffpost Live, and for good reason. They chat about the state of American science education, and the ways in which Emden is trying to shake things up. Josh and Emden talk about how we can make science education more interesting and cultur...
The War on Christmas
December 30, 2013 19:07 - 31 minutes - 14.3 MBAs the War on Christmas wages on, our host, Josh Zepps, interviews Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst for American's United for the Separation of Church and State, Editor of Church & State magazine and author of Close Encounters with the Religious Right : Journeys into the Twilight Zone of Religion and Politics. Together they get to the bottom of the War on Christmas. They explain how saying "Happy Holidays" is a violation of Christian liberty and explore the vast number of schools bannin...
Kathryn Joyce - The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption
December 23, 2013 19:21 - 37 minutes - 17.3 MBJoining Lindsay Bernstein this week is Kathryn Joyce, one of the foremost reporters chronicling the Religious Right today. She made “Quiverfull” a household name with her first book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.Her new book is called The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption. The book is the product of four years of reporting from four different countries. Joyce found that adoption has become the hot new spiritual fad among U.S. evange...
P.J. O'Rourke - American Satirist, Journalist and Author
December 16, 2013 20:06 - 33 minutes - 15.5 MBThis week on Point of Inquiry, Josh Zepps welcomes P.J. O’Rourke, humorist, cultural commentator, and best selling author of sixteen books. An early proponent of “gonzo journalism” and is a self-described libertarian, O’Rourke has served as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, and has spent 20 years reporting for Rolling Stone and The Atlantic as the world’s only “trouble spot humorist,” going to wars, riots, rebellions, and other “Holidays in Hell” in more than 40 countries. O'Rourke is the...
Barry W. Lynn - Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State
December 10, 2013 14:00 - 34 minutes - 15.7 MBThis week on Point of Inquiry, Lindsay Beyerstein talks with Barry Lynn, Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, and a strong advocate of separation of church and state. The conversation focuses on the Supreme Court's recent decision to hear the Hobby Lobby contraception mandate case. This is the most high profile case challenging the birth control mandate, one of the requirements of the Affordabl...
Gadadhara Pandit Dasa - First Hindu Chaplain for Columbia University
December 02, 2013 21:03 - 37 minutes - 17.1 MBThis week's Point of Inquiry features Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, first ever Hindu Chaplain for Columbia University and New York University, the interfaith chaplain at Union Theological Seminary, and author of Urban Monk: Exploring Karma, Consciousness, and the Divine. Pandit, who teaches courses on Hindu scriptures, has spoken at a recent TEDx Conference and was featured in the NPR piece "Long Days and Short Nights of a Hindu Monk." He appeared in a PBS documentary on the Bhagavad Gita...
Paul Offit, MD - Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine
November 25, 2013 18:07 - 38 minutes - 22.1 MBThis week’s guest on Point of Inquiry, Paul A. Offit, MDis best known as a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and a staunch, public supporter of vaccination and opponent of pseudoscientific alternative medicine. His most recent book, Do you Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine points a critical eye at the alt-med industry, one than takes in 34 billion dollars a year with little to no regulation. Are patients being harmed, and is it any worse or better than s...
Bill Nye The Science Guy
November 17, 2013 00:12 - 47 minutes - 21.8 MBFamed educator, engineer and "Science Guy," Bill Nye Joins our host Josh Zepps for this week's Point of Inquiry. They discuss Bill's start as an Engineer and part time stand up comedian to his groundbreaking work in television educating a generation on science. They also delve into Bill's view into the future of science, science education, as well as how to become excessively rich using the tools of science to change the world.
Katherine Stewart: The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children
November 11, 2013 19:31 - 30 minutes - 14.2 MBPoint of Inquiry, the flagship podcast for the Center for Inquiry, presents a special episode recorded before a live audience at the 2013 CFI Summit in Tacoma, Washington, with new co-host Lindsay Beyerstein. The fundamentalist, Christian right's influence and impact on our schools and the educating of our children is the subject of the new book The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children. Its author, Katherine Stewart, is our guest on this edition of Poi...
Leonard Mlodinow: Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
November 05, 2013 21:20 - 31 minutes - 14.6 MBPoint of Inquiry, the flagship podcast of the Center for Inquiry, relaunches with a special episode recorded before a live audience at the 2013 CFI Summit in Tacoma, Washington, with new co-host Josh Zepps of HuffPost Live. Our unconscious minds offer us something of a paradox. On the one hand, we'd be lost without it, as it processes information without us ever being aware of it — it's how we deal with the real world in real time. But on the other hand, we don't always have a complete pic...
Neil deGrasse Tyson - Communicating Science
September 30, 2013 19:25 - 55 minutes - 19 MBPoint of Inquiry is on a short hiatus right now as we transition to a new podcast team. In the meantime, enjoy these classic episodes from the POI archives, featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Susan Jacoby, and other luminaries in the science and secularism movement. Our guest this week needs little introduction—he may be our most famous public communicator of science. He's Neil DeGrasse Tyson, renowned American astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum...
Bill Nye - In Praise of Reason (and Skepticism)
September 10, 2013 13:09 - 36 minutes - 12.7 MBPoint of Inquiry is on a short hiatus right now as we transition to a new podcast team. In the meantime, enjoy these classic episodes from the POI archives, featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Susan Jacoby, and other luminaries in the science and secularism movement. Recently in New Orleans, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry held the very first CSIcon—the conference dedicated to scientific inquiry and critical thinking. The main honoree: Bill Nye the Science Guy, who was given CSI's...
Neil deGrasse Tyson - Communicating Science to the Public
July 29, 2013 21:13 - 47 minutes - 16.3 MBPoint of Inquiry is on a short hiatus right now as we transition to a new podcast team. In the meantime, enjoy these classic episodes from the POI archives, featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Susan Jacoby, and other luminaries in the science and secularism movement. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of America’s leading spokespersons for science. The research areas he focuses on are star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. In addi...
Ethan Zuckerman - Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection
June 24, 2013 19:44 - 35 minutes - 16 MBHost: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is an inspiring thinker whom we've wanted to get on the show for a long, long time: Ethan Zuckerman. He's the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and works at MIT's Media Lab. He's also the co-founder of Global Voices, a community of global bloggers—and has worked in the past at Geekcorps and Tripod. We're here to discuss his new book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection—which among other things argues that the technologi...
Mario Livio - Brilliant Blunders From Darwin to Einstein
June 20, 2013 01:44 - 30 minutes - 14.1 MBHost: Chris Mooney One thing we often forget about great scientists, especially as they are lionized and mythologized: they made mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Sometimes, even, brilliant ones. Charles Darwin, for instance, didn't understand genetics. He and Gregor Mendel were as ships passing in the night. Granted, Darwin eventually realized that he needed a better theory of heredity in order for his idea of natural selection to work—so he came up with "pangenesis," a completely wrong idea ...
Daniel Dennett - Tools for Thinking
June 11, 2013 20:26 - 45 minutes - 20.8 MBHost: Indre Viskontas Having spent 50 years as an influential thinker, Daniel Dennett has earned the right to tell us how to think. His latest book is a collection of 77 tools for thinking, which every self-respecting critical thinker should consider, if not actively use. American philosopher and author Daniel C. Dennett is perhaps best known in cognitive science for his multiple drafts (or "fame in the brain") model of human consciousness and he is among the most influential philosophers ...
Stephan Lewandowsky - The Mind of the Conspiracy Theorist
June 04, 2013 16:48 - 47 minutes - 21.6 MBHost: Chris Mooney From 9-11, to the death of Osama bin Laden, to the Boston Bombings, there's been a consistently bizarre and troubling reaction by some members of the public. We're referring to the people—a minority, to be sure, but a surprisingly large one—who always seem to think there's some kind of cover up. The U.S. government, they feel, was really behind the attacks on, uh, itself. And as for Bin Laden—well, he isn't really dead. These people are called conspiracy theorists, and,...
Katha Pollitt - Is Religion Inherently Sexist?
May 23, 2013 03:37 - 31 minutes - 14.5 MBHost: Chris Mooney Over the weekend, the Center for Inquiry's Women in Secularism II conference unfolded in Washington, D.C.—and we caught up with one of the event's most distinguished speakers, the feminist poet and author Katha Pollitt. You probably know her "Subject to Debate" column in the Nation—always both insightful and also hilarious to read. It has been called, by the Washington Post, the "best place to go for original thinking on the left." The column won the National Magazine Aw...
Michael Levi - Fracking, Pipelines, and Science
May 14, 2013 16:29 - 29 minutes - 13.5 MBHost: Chris Mooney A few months back on this show, we heard from Bill McKibben, the celebrated environmental writer and, more recently, leader of a mass movement around preventing climate change that has focused on blocking the Keystone XL pipeline. McKibben makes a compelling case that our climate system is at dire risk. But many thinkers who fully accept the science of climate change nonetheless take a very different approach to climate and energy policy. And as someone who personally s...
Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday
May 08, 2013 04:17 - 40 minutes - 18.6 MBNote: You can watch this episode on Youtube. In this special episode of Point of Inquiry, Chris and Indre speak with the Pulitzer Prize winning Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Dr. Diamond is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles and has traveled extensively to New Guinea for his research. His observations there form the foundation of his new book, The World Until Yesterday: What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies, which is the subject of ...
Mary Roach - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
May 01, 2013 01:19 - 38 minutes - 17.7 MBHost: Indre Viskontas In the science section at your local bookstore, you'll find plenty of books on everything from the brain, to the climate, to the cosmos. But how many books will you find that take you on a tour of the digestive tract—from our mouths, to our stomachs, to our intestines? Popular science writer Mary Roach's new book, Gulp, does just that. Decoding the science of taboo topics like vaginal weight-lifting, amputee bowling leagues, and how much food it takes to burst a huma...
Scott Atran - What Makes a Terrorist?
April 23, 2013 15:03 - 41 minutes - 19 MBHost: Chris Mooney Back in the summer of 2011—just before the 10 year anniversary of 9/11—this show welcomed on Scott Atran, an anthropologist who is a leading expert on terrorism and violent extremism. Now, in the wake of the Boston bombings and the dramatic capture of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, we called Atran back to discuss the first large scale U.S. terrorist bombing since 9/11. As Atran's research shows, the Tsarnaev brothers share many parallels with other young, disaffected men wh...
Neil Gross - Why Are Professors (and Scientists) So Liberal?
April 16, 2013 16:58 - 29 minutes - 13.5 MBHost: Chris Mooney We've all heard the claim: Academia is liberal. And it indoctrinates students. It kills their religious faith and basically—or at least, so the allegation goes—transforms them into unkempt, pot-smoking hippies. As it turns out, this claim is precisely half true. Yes, academia is really liberal. But no, this has virtually nothing at all to do with ideological brainwashing. That's the provocative claim of a new book by Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia. It...
A.C. Grayling - The God Argument
April 09, 2013 12:14 - 33 minutes - 15.5 MBHost: Chris Mooney Remember all the greatest hits of religious apologists—the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments for God's existence? You may have learned how to refute them in college—but not, perhaps, with the zest and humor shown by renowned philosopher A.C. Grayling in his new book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and For Humanism. But Grayling isn't just making a negative case—his book is about how to live, and flourish, without religion in your life. It...
Frans de Waal - The Bonobo and the Atheist
April 02, 2013 07:27 - 31 minutes - 14.4 MBHost: Chris Mooney You hear it a lot from religious believers: Faith is about doing good works, bringing about good in the world, and showing compassion. In fact, some go further and argue that you can't really be moral without religion. Well, says primatologist Frans de Waal, they really ought to take a look at our close cousin the bonobo—in his new book The Bonobo and the Atheist. For that matter, De Waal continues, those defending a faith-only version of morality ought to look at any ...
Carol Tavris - The Science of Sex and Gender
March 26, 2013 07:18 - 45 minutes - 20.8 MBHost: Indre Viskontas Back in February, Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer made a decision that pushed gender issues and the work/life balance back into the headlines: she mandated that her employees can no longer work from home. It's a decision that impacts families with children in a big way—and puts a focus on women in the workplace. Are decisions like Mayer's related to a broader cultural bias against women? Do biological differences between men and women account for the gender dis...
Amanda Marcotte - Skepticism Needs Feminism
March 19, 2013 06:22 - 34 minutes - 15.8 MBHost: Chris Mooney Later this year, May 17 to 19 in Washington, D.C., the Center for Inquiry will convene its second "Women in Secularism" conference. There are a host of great speakers, many of whom we've had on this show before, like Susan Jacoby, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Greta Christina, and Rebecca Watson. And we're going to be there covering it. But in the meantime, to get you ready, we've invited on one of the featured speakers ahead of time—Amanda Marcotte. Marcotte writes for and...
Mark Lynas - Science and the Left
March 05, 2013 06:12 - 39 minutes - 18 MBHost: Chris Mooney I'm a big defender of the proposition that when it comes to abusing science, the political left and the political right are very different beasts. But that doesn't make the left innocent of science abuses—and one man who knows that very well is Mark Lynas. He's a British environmentalist and author, and he recently gained dramatic attention for his public conversion on the issue GM crops—denouncing his prior allies, and also his prior self, on the issue. Lynas had been...
Matthew Hutson - The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking
February 28, 2013 10:04 - 40 minutes - 18.6 MBHost: Indre Viskontas Even the hard-core skeptics believe in magic, says Matthew Hutson in his new book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep us Happy, Healthy and Sane which has just been released in paperback. Most of us have some sentimental objects that would seem to lose their importance if replaced by an exact copy. We imbue our pets with human personality traits. We are disgusted at the thought of eating a cake that looks like fecal matter. We expect that what ...
Point of Inquiry Live | Steven Pinker - The Decline of Violence
February 20, 2013 16:03 - 52 minutes - 24.1 MBNote: You can watch this episode on Youtube. Since the horrendous massacre of children and teachers in Newtown, CT last year, gun control and the second amendment have been frequent topics of the national conversation. Point of Inquiry would be remiss if we didn't add our signature long-form interview style to the discussion. To that end, we interviewed Steven Pinker whose recent book suggests that we are, contrary to popular belief, living in the most peaceful time in humanity's existence...
Susan Jacoby - Freethought’s Forgotten Hero
February 12, 2013 19:31 - 35 minutes - 16.2 MBHost: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Susan Jacoby. She's the bestselling author of a number of books about secularism and American culture, including Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason. Jacoby started her career at the Washington Post, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Newsday, Harper's, The Nation, Vogue, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the AARP Magazine, among other publicat...
Carl Zimmer - Viruses and Other Little Things
February 05, 2013 19:14 - 43 minutes - 19.8 MBThis year's flu season has been dubbed the worst in recent history, despite the fact that the flu vaccine is fairly effective and readily available. But of course, not everyone experiencing flu-like symptoms actually has the flu—with so many cold viruses and bacterial infections being passed around, it seems that everyone has been sick this January. Long nights, low humidity, holiday parties all combine to create the perfect breeding ground for the tiny organisms that make us miserable. Sin...
Paul Krugman - Science and Pseudoscience in Economics
January 28, 2013 22:10 - 36 minutes - 16.8 MBHost: Chris Mooney We are thrilled by our guest this week, who is not only one of the world's most famous economists and economics commentators, but also a Nobel Laureate in his field: Paul Krugman. In case he needs any introduction: He is a professor of economics at Princeton and a columnist for the New York Times, as well of the author of the blog on its website entitled "The Conscience of a Liberal." The occasion for our interview is the release of his latest book, End this Depression ...
Sean Carroll - The Particle at the End of the Universe
January 22, 2013 23:31 - 34 minutes - 15.9 MBHost: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Sean Carroll—theoretical physicist at CalTech, and skilled science communicator. I've known Sean and his work for almost a decade, and I've invited him on to talk about his latest book: The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World. Sean Carroll is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on theoretical physics and cosmology, especially the origin and constituent...
Maria Konnikova - How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
January 15, 2013 01:43 - 34 minutes - 15.8 MBHost: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Maria Konnikova, who is the author of a simply fascinating new book about training your mind so you're as sharp as the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. It's entitled Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. In addition to her new book, Konnikova writes the "Literally Psyched" column for Scientific American, and is a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia University. She's also written for The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, a...
Phil Plait - #Notpocalypse!
January 08, 2013 02:17 - 35 minutes - 16.5 MBHost: Chris Mooney This is our first show of 2013, and notably, we're still here. A lot of people actually thought the world was going to end at the end of last year, which, presumably, means that now it's rejoicing time. And also reflection time. Time for reflection on all the things that people are capable of believing, as well as the things that might really lead to global catastrophe someday. To help us in that process, we've invited back our expert on all things related to the world...
Scott Sigler - Encouraging Critical Thinking Through Science Fiction
January 02, 2013 01:48 - 43 minutes - 20.1 MBHost: Indre Viskontas It's become almost a truism that in their spare time, skeptics tend to gravitate towards TV shows, novels and games that portray the very monsters, myths and conspiracies that they work so hard to debunk. A great story is just as entertaining to the most hardened skeptics as it is to the rest of the population. And because they are often more knowledgeable about the history of a particular monster or myth, skeptics might even enjoy fictional depictions of pet topics mo...
Ronald A. Lindsay and Michael De Dora - Mr. Science Goes to Washington
December 27, 2012 07:57 - 38 minutes - 17.7 MBHost: Chris Mooney We usually record Point of Inquiry at a distance. Over the phone. Skyping. But for this show, I packed up my gear and hailed a cab—to the Center for Inquiry's brand new Office of Public Policy in downtown, Washington, D.C. The Center for Inquiry is here to literally make this country listen to reason... and science. It's a sensibility that is simply in far too short of a supply in this town. So I sat down with Ronald A. Lindsay, CFI's president, and Michael De Dora, he...
David Brin - Uplifting Existence
December 20, 2012 05:12 - 42 minutes - 19.4 MBHost: Chris Mooney It's rare that I can say about a guest that, I read his books when I was a kid. But David Brin is just such a guest. He's the celebrated science fiction author of the Uplift novels, The Postman, and many other books—most recently, Existence. I read the Uplift books when I was tearing through sci-fi as a teenager. But on top of that, Brin is also a trained scientist and public policy commentator. And in his commentary, as in his novels, he's concerned with the same theme...
Bill McKibben - Do the Math
December 13, 2012 15:20 - 31 minutes - 14.4 MBHost: Chris Mooney When we last had Bill McKibben on this show in 2010, I was mainly treating him as another bestselling science author—one who happens to focus on climate change. Well. Something kinda big happened in the intervening years, and McKibben has become, simply put, the country's leading environmental spokesman and advocate through his organization 350.org. From protests against the Keystone XL pipeline to, most recently, his "Do the Math" tour, rallying of college students to...
Samuel Arbesman - The Half-Life of Facts
December 04, 2012 09:42 - 40 minutes - 18.6 MBHost: Indre Viskontas Because we live in an uncertain world, we arm ourselves with facts to gain a sense of control and therefore some modicum of comfort. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow even though it disappears tonight. But what happens when facts, those bits of information that we believed captured some fundamental truth about our world, are shown to be no longer true? With the exponential rise in our knowledge about our universe comes a tsunami of data overturning what we once t...
Steven Novella - Exposing Medical Nonsense
November 27, 2012 13:36 - 40 minutes - 18.5 MBHost: Chris Mooney One of the first people I ever got to know in skepticism was Steven Novella. He was a professor at Yale, just starting out as an organized skeptic—I was a student, just getting fired up about the same stuff. Since then, Steve has become hugely successful as a skeptic leader and as a communicator of skeptical ideas, particularly when it comes to his area of specialty, alternative medicine. And one thing I've always noticed about him over the years is his unending capaci...
Michael Gordin - The Pseudoscience Wars
November 20, 2012 05:47 - 32 minutes - 15 MBHost: Chris Mooney Before the "complementary and alternative medicine" fad, and before UFO craze, lived a man whom you might call the first modern pseudoscientist. His name was Immanuel Velikovsky. He had a strange theory about a comet—that turned out to be Venus—shaping the course of human history. He tangled with Carl Sagan about it—and with the scientific community about it. And then, he was mostly forgotten. But no longer, because Princeton historian of science Michael Gordin has tra...
Jacques Berlinerblau - How to Be Secular
November 13, 2012 05:45 - 34 minutes - 15.9 MBHost: Chris Mooney On this show, we often debate the state of American secularism—covering topics like the rise of the so-called "nones," or the unending battle to rescue the country from the pernicious influence of Christian right. Our guest this week, Jacques Berlinerblau, has a provocative thesis about all this. He says that American secularism has clearly and distinctly lost major ground. And to recover from that loss, well... he's got some suggestions that might not go down well—but i...
Oliver Sacks - Hallucinations
November 06, 2012 03:43 - 39 minutes - 18.3 MBHost: Indre Viskotnas Despite our individual differences, highlighted especially during an election, much of what we see, hear, smell or feel is shareable: that is, when standing in front of an object, we can more or less agree that it has a particular color, shape, texture, size and so on. But what if I tell you that I see an object clearly which you do not? Or hear a voice that doesn't have a physical source? Now we enter the world of hallucinations. Hallucinations, or perceptions of obj...
Special Double Episode: Jon Ronson and Richard Wiseman, with Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney
October 31, 2012 20:44 - 55 minutes - 25.5 MBHosts: Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney At the 2012 CSICON conference in Nashville, Tennessee, your Point of Inquiry hosts Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney finally actually found themselves in the same place. The result was a show that features both of them covering current events—the 2012 election, the passing of CFI founder Paul Kurtz—and each also conducting an interview! Our guests: Jon Ronson (interviewed by Chris Mooney) is a journalist, filmmaker, radio personality and humorist-aut...
Bruce Hood - Superstitions in Baseball
October 23, 2012 03:25 - 36 minutes - 16.7 MBHost: Indre Viskontas The month of October is associated with falling leaves, autumn winds and hallowe'en. But for sports fans in the US, it also signals a high point in America's national pastime: baseball's postseason. After a long run of 162 games, the last weeks of October are ripe with matchups in which legends are made and broken. Any skeptic worth his or her salt, however, can't help but marvel at the diversity and frequency of ritualistic behaviors on display amongst these world cla...