Just what does the Right believe about speech in public schools? — On Monday the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. …

The law of unintended consequences strikes again — I grew up in the pro-life movement. As a child, I remember seeing gruesome images of torn up fetuses, the remains of late-term abortions. …

Conservatives have become what they once claimed to despise — In the 1960s and 70s, the Supreme Court issued a number of opinions of immense cultural significance. Miranda v. Arizona (1966) required police officers to inform suspects of their right to remain silent and their right to have an attorney present for any questioning. Loving v. Virginia (1967) overturned laws…

And I can prove it — Abortion foes rest their position on the claim that human life begins at conception. All persons have a right to life, and a fetus is a person. Therefore, a fetus has a right to life. There’s just one problem. They don’t actually believe this. Want to know how I know? If abortion is homicide, why not charge women with murder? …

Not wanting to work a shit job isn’t the same thing — It’s a bit of conventional wisdom these days — and not just on the Right — that unemployment benefits paid out during the pandemic discouraged people from coming back to work. …

Here’s how we can start patching it up — This week, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Carson v. Makin, a case that challenged Maine’s tuition-assistance program for students at private schools. Being the most rural state in the country, there are many places where it’s not cost-effective for Maine to run a public school. But all Maine…

The search for truth is always a collective effort — Mathematics claims to be a deductive science. Unlike the empirical sciences, whose conclusions are only ever tentative, once a mathematical theorem is proved, it is proved for all time. But what does it mean to “prove” a theorem? Presumably it means proceeding in logical steps from a set of premises…

Why it’s necessary to reconcile freedom and faith — In 2016, the American musician and songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. While he ultimately accepted the honor, for the first two weeks after its announcement he remained silent, prompting some to speculate whether he intended even to acknowledge it. In an op-ed in the New…

How Descartes got epistemology backward — The French philosopher Rene Descartes famously grounded his theory of knowledge in the basic assumption cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Descartes’ point was that, while he could imagine himself without his body, he could not imagine himself without his mind. …