Point of Inquiry

Point 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...

Point 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. It's the beginning of a new year here at Point of Inquiry , and we've got a pretty good guest to kick it off. He needs no intro...

Point 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. According to the USDA, Americans produce and consume more beef, veal, and chicken than any other nation in the world. As a resu...

Point 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. Susan Jacoby is the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism , now in its tenth hardcover printing and recently...

Point 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,...

Host: 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: Di...

Host: 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 h...

Host: 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...

Host: 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...

Host: 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...

Host: 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 nonethele...

Note: 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,...

Host: 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 li...

Host: 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 re...

Host: 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...

Host: 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...

Host: 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 matt...

Host: 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...

Host: 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 in...

Host: 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 iss...

Host: 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 ar...

Note: 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...

Host: 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 ,...

This 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 c...

Host: 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...