Point of Inquiry

Halloween is almost here, and Target stores are pulling clown masks from their shelves. After the creepy clown craze made its way through Europe, the circus has finally arrived in the US with sightings in at least 40 states, 10 of which have now resulted in actual arrests. With more reports filed every day, the clown scare that's taking the nation by storm shows no signs of breaking. Where are all...

Today the United States is the most secular and irreligious it has ever been. According to   Pew Research , the percentage of Americans who identify as atheist, agnostic, or having no religion in particular is up to 23%, compared to the 16% it was in 2007. With a lack of religious affiliation becoming normalized, it's hard to imagine what it was like for the nonreligious when God's primacy was alm...

Phil Torres is an author, contributing writer for the Future of Life Institute, and an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. His writing has been featured in numerous publications such as Time , Motherboard , Salon , Huffington Post , and our very own Free Inquiry .  His book is The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse .   Since the beginni...

Dr. Julia Shaw is a psychological scientist and senior researcher in the Department of Law and Social Science at London South Bank University. She teaches at the undergraduate and graduate level and her research on false memory has been published in several international academic journals. She returns to Point of Inquiry this week to discuss her new book, The Memory Illusion .   Our memories are a...

Since the beginning of humankind unpredictable forces of nature have been among our most dangerous threats: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, tornados, hurricanes, and other disasters that trigger our fight-or-flight survival instincts. Pollution invoked climate change is exacerbating natural disasters and spurring unprecedented human migration. So when so many people are clamorin...

Death is an unsettling thing to come to grips with. We know it is inevitable that it will one day happen to us. One of the first things most of us learn about death is that it happens to everyone, yet perhaps because no one ever comes back to tell the tale, there's a lot about our impending doom that's difficult to fully grasp. To help us take comfort in our inexorable demise, we welcome Andrew St...

Emily Willingham is a journalist, scientist, and award winning skeptical blogger, with much of her work centered on autism and debunking junk science controversies. Recently the autism community has shown a surge in support for medical cannabis, as anti-vaccination activists claim that cannabis may hold the key for a cure, and many people with autism claim it to be a useful for controlling their s...

Elizabeth Greenwood teaches at Columbia University and like many other young professionals she has an insurmountable amount of student loan debt. With the overwhelming feeling that she would never escape her debt she desperately longed for a new start. There was no going back on what she had done to accumulate her debt, but perhaps she could skip ahead. She began to investigate what it would take...

Bronwen Dickey is a contributing editor at The Oxford American, and author of Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon . Her writing can also be found in The New York Times , The Virginia Quarterly Review , Newsweek , Slate , The San Francisco Chronicle , and numerous other publications. For Dickey's  most recent piece , just published in Popular Mechanics , she embarks on the "Conspire-Sea Crui...

Those following the Olympics this year may have noticed Michael Phelps sporting circular bruises all over his body. That's because Phelps, like many Olympic athletes, won't go after their medals without going after their cups. The growing fad of cupping is an ancient practice in which cups are placed all over the body and skin is suctioned inside the cup, bursting blood vessels and creating circul...

  Iraqi-born writer Faisal Saeed Al Mutar is a blogger for the Huffington Post and a columnist for the Center for Inquiry's own Free Inquiry magazine. Having grown up in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein, he's now a human rights activist and secularism advocate as well as founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement and Secular Post.    For Faisal and progressive Muslims and secularists acr...

  David Cay Johnston is an award winning investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author, as well as one of few journalists who has deeply dug into the dirty laundry of Donald Trump, now the Republican nominee for President of the United States. In 1988 Johnston left the LA Times to report on casino gambling in Atlantic City, which resulted in uncovering a detailed history of corru...

Free speech on college campuses has become a topic of impassioned debate, as the lines between hate speech and harassment, or peaceful protest and public disturbance, are rather blurry and hotly contested. Particularly since the protest movements of the 1960s, college campuses have long been a kind of testing ground for different norms and boundaries of free expression. At the same time, some inst...

  Religions have always gone through transitions over time. Not only do the faiths themselves evolve, but the role they play in day-to-day life adapts to fit the needs of a given culture. As the youngest Abrahamic religion on the market, all eyes are on Islam, as a debate rages as to whether there is any chance of reform or secularization within a religion that is so deeply woven into the fabric o...

    It was only a couple of decades ago that the most complex handheld computing system fathomable was a TI-83 graphing calculator. Technology has usually served to make our lives easier, but in the post-digital boom, in which full-blown pocket size computers are the norm, our attention spans are shrinking along with our free time (and graphing is the least of our data worries). Technology can see...

Autumn Whitefield-Mandrano is the author of the acclaimed new book on feminism and beauty, Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women's Lives . Her work can be found such outlets as Glamour , Jezebel , Salon ,  The Guardian , and her own blog, The Beheld: Beauty and What It Means . Her book takes a closer look at why beauty is so coveted in American society and how the pedestal of beauty affe...

Michelle Vines grew up knowing she was different from other people. She always assumed she was just a bit odd and eccentric but never in a way that suggested she wasn't neurotypical. She lived in Australia where she excelled in math and science and became a chemical engineer in the oil and gas industry. After finding her work environment deeply unsatisfying and her personal relationships increasin...

Secularist bloggers, writers and LGBT activists are being hacked to death in the streets of Bangladesh by militant Islamic groups. To help us get to the bottom of why there needs to be no end in sight to the violence is the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy Director, Michael De Dora. Starting in April of 2013 when secular activist Avijit Roy reached out to De Dora, the Center for Inquir...

Author and Guardian US   columnist Jessica Valenti is a pioneer of digital-age feminist writing, starting her blog Feministing  in 2004, and becoming known as one of the leading voices in the discussion about gender equality. Valenti's newest contribution to the movement is her new book, Sex Object: A Memoir .   Her witty and courageous book explores the cold, hard realities of growing up female i...

In the literature about religious conversion, embracing a new faith is usually explained as being a profound and magical experience. A flash of light, a near death experience, an emotional new beginning; these are all common themes in religious conversion stories. But what about the less flashy stories of people who change their religious affiliation simply for reasons of practicality? Point of In...

Maia Szalavitz is an author and award-winning journalist specializing in science, public policy, and addiction treatment. Most famous of her several books was her 2006 exposé, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled–Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids . Her latest book is Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction .   As a recovering addict herself, Szalavitz knows about t...

This week, Josh Zepps sits down with commentator and writer Shadi Hamid. He's a senior fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer to The Atlantic , and his new book is Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World .   There is a heated debate about whether there is something intrinsically unique ab...

Dr. Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician-gynecologist and writer, returning to Point of Inquiry to discuss her new book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting . Known from her popular blog as The Skeptical OB , she has appeared in several publications and news outlets over the years educating the public about the facts of birthing healthy babies, and more importantly correcting the misinformat...

Dr. Ned Hallowell is a child and adult psychiatrist, a New York Times   bestselling author, and among the world's leading experts in the field of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He's written numerous books about ADHD and modern distraction, including Driven to Distraction , Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder ,   Worry: Controll...

For a very long time marriage was considered a foundation of American life. Adulthood and marriage came hand in hand, and shortly after marriage children were the next logical step. Breaking that mold wasn't a socially acceptable or financially viable option for women. Today, however, marriage rates show us a very different picture of what is considered the norm. To lend some insight into these ch...