This past weekend my wife and I spent half our Saturday procuring and laying down mulch in our yard. As I covered up last year’s dry and faded mulch with its moist, deep black replacement, I had two thoughts. The first was that all these hours of work were making what seemed to me a merely marginal improvement in the lawn’s appearance. The second was to ask myself, is this “adulting?”

Merriam-Webster’s contains no definition for “adulting,” but according to Urban Dictionary (my go to for all slang terms), it means “to carry out one or more of the duties…

My oldest sons are nine, so 2032 will be the first presidential election they will be eligible to vote in. I’m not sure American democracy has that long. If GOP legislatures and conservative judges keep having their way, it’s only a matter of time before “Election Day” becomes a bitterly ironic farce.

We could do something about this, of course. We could pass the For the People Act, a bill that would ban partisan gerrymandering, undo almost all the voter suppression laws recently passed by Republican legislatures, and even make Election Day a national holiday, among other things. …

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
— Walter Savage Landor, “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”

In The Age of Atheists, historian Peter Watson traces the history of the secular search for meaning and purpose, from Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God to the present day. …

Controversy erupted earlier this week when Dr. Seuss Enterprises (Seuss), which holds the copyrights to the works of Theodore Geisel, announced that it had decided last year to cease publication of six of his books. Those books were And To Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street, McElligot’s Pool, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, Scrambled Eggs Super, and The Cat’s Quizzer. Seuss made this decision on the grounds that the books in question contain negative and hurtful stereotypes, but no sooner had the announcement been made than politicians, pundits, and everyday readers chimed in to denounce…

Shortly after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, I created a Facebook group called Recovering From QAnon. Though I had never been a devotee of the QAnon conspiracy theory, I had been a volunteer organizer for Recovering from Religion, a support group for people who have left their churches, for several years (Recovering from Religion is not affiliated with Recovering from QAnon). I hoped that my experience in the one context would translate over to the other, allowing me to help people who might be trying to get themselves or loved ones away from what had become a dangerous cult, as the…

Is it acceptable to influence another person in order to change their thoughts or behavior? Is it acceptable to coerce another person to change their thoughts or behavior? Is it always easy to tell the difference between influence and coercion?

If someone is engaged in civil dialogue with another, almost all of us would say they’re merely trying to influence the other’s thinking, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If, on the other hand, someone is harassing and threatening another, we would probably say that’s unacceptable. In fact the law already prohibits threats and harassment, and the Supreme Court has…

On Monday night you delivered a twenty-three minute long monologue in which you sought to reassure your viewers that they were not crazy for worrying about widespread fraud in the recent election. Your viewers were right to be concerned, you said, and you made a number of claims both about the election itself and the surrounding context that gave the impression that our system of voting is fundamentally unfair. In fact, you suggested that it is unfair by design, with the specific intent to harm certain voters.

“It’s the milk bottles at the fair. They knew you were coming. They…

In 1994 Utah became the first state to pass what has come to be known as “stand your ground” (SYG). Florida followed in 2005, and since then a total of 34 states have passed similar laws. SYG alters the traditional rule of self-defense, which for centuries has required the defendant to avoid a violent confrontation if at all possible. The only exception to the duty to retreat that the common law recognized was called the Castle Doctrine. Based on the idea that “a man’s home is his castle,” the Castle Doctrine allows one to use force in self-defense without trying…