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 introduction. He's Brian Greene—celebrity physicist, bestselling author, television star and all around s...
Aug 19, 2013•34 min
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 result, the status of animal welfare in the meat production industry should be of some concern to all Am...
Aug 12, 2013•45 min
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 published in paperback. Freethinkers was hailed in the New York Times as an “ardent and insightful ...
Aug 05, 2013•33 min
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, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. In addition to...
Jul 29, 2013•47 min
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: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection— which among other things argues that the technological ...
Jun 24, 2013•35 min
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 his idea of natural selection to work—so he came up with "pangenesis," a completely wrong idea that.....
Jun 20, 2013•31 min
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 in the brain") model of human consciousness and he is among the most influential philosophers of our...
Jun 11, 2013•45 min
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 for Bin Laden—well, he isn't really dead. These people are called conspiracy theorists, and, their ...
Jun 04, 2013•47 min
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 , the "best place to go for original thinking on the left." The column won the National Magazine Awa...
May 23, 2013•32 min
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 nonetheless take a very different approach to climate and energy policy. And as someone who personally sees st...
May 14, 2013•30 min
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, The World Until Yesterday: What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies , which is the subject of th...
May 08, 2013•41 min
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 like vaginal weight-lifting, amputee bowling leagues, and how much food it takes to burst a human stom...
May 01, 2013•39 min
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 research shows, the Tsarnaev brothers share many parallels with other young, disaffected men who opt f...
Apr 23, 2013•41 min
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 the provocative claim of a new book by Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia. It's entit...
Apr 16, 2013•29 min
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 a negative case—his book is about how to live, and flourish, without religion in your life. It's abo...
Apr 09, 2013•34 min
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 matter, De Waal continues, those defending a faith-only version of morality ought to look at any number ...
Apr 02, 2013•31 min
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 bias against women? Do biological differences between men and women account for the gender disparity...
Mar 26, 2013•45 min
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 invited on one of the featured speakers ahead of time—Amanda Marcotte. Marcotte writes for and manages...
Mar 19, 2013•35 min
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 issue GM crops—denouncing his prior allies, and also his prior self, on the issue. Lynas had been an anti...
Mar 05, 2013•39 min
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 are disgusted at the thought of eating a cake that looks like fecal matter. We expect that what goes a...
Feb 28, 2013•41 min
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 that we are, contrary to popular belief, living in the most peaceful time in humanity's existence. Ste...
Feb 20, 2013•53 min
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 , The Nation , Vogue , The American Prospect , Mother Jones , and the AARP Magazine, among other publi...
Feb 12, 2013•35 min
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 combine to create the perfect breeding ground for the tiny organisms that make us miserable. Singers ...
Feb 05, 2013•43 min
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 Liberal ." The occasion for our interview is the release of his latest book, End this Depression Now...
Jan 28, 2013•37 min
Host: 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 constituents of t...
Jan 22, 2013•35 min
Host: 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 , and...
Jan 15, 2013•34 min
Host: 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 ending...
Jan 08, 2013•36 min
Host: 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 more th...
Jan 02, 2013•44 min
Host: 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, head of th...
Dec 27, 2012•39 min
Host: 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 themes tha...
Dec 20, 2012•42 min
