This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Editor and Legal Correspondent for Slate, where she writes the “Supreme Court Dispatches” and “Jurisprudence” columns. Her legal commentary won her a National Magazine Award in 2013. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School and she joins Lindsay Beyerstein to talk about the crisis facing capital punishment in …
Our guest this week is Farzana Hassan, a Pakistani-Canadian political scientist, a columnist for the Toronto Sun, whose new book is Prophecy and the Fundamentalist Quest: An Integrative Study of Christian and Muslim Apocalyptic Religion. Hassan joins Point of Inquiry’s Josh Zepps to talk about issues surrounding Islam, in particular the difficulty in honestly dealing with terrorism and extremism …
Our guest this week is Donald Prothero, paleontologist, geologist, and author of the new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future. He’s an expert on the effect of past climate change on the fossil record, as well as the co-author of Abominable Science, a skeptical look at cryptozoology and cryptozoologists with Daniel Loxton. Science Denialism …
Our guest this week is Cara Santa Maria, contributor to Al Jazeera America’s science show TechKnow, and the host of the podcast Talk Nerdy. This neuroscientist, science educator, producer, writer, and television personality has brought her intelligence and insights to the Huffington Post as its former senior science editor, was the co-host and producer of TakePart Live on Pivot TV, and …
This week Point of Inquiry welcomes the well-known atheist blogger, speaker, and author Greta Christina to talk about her new book, Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other and Why, a no nonsense guide to leveling with everyone in your life about your non-belief. Greta is a woman at home with difficult conversations. Her …
This week, Point of Inquiry is excited to welcome “The Amazing” James Randi: famed magician a godfather (as it were) of the modern reason movement, and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Randi is the subject of a new documentary film, An Honest Liar, which brings to life Randi’s intricate investigations that publicly exposed …
This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Barbara Ehrenreich, award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, she went undercover as a minimum wage worker and in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, she took aim at our punishing national obsession with positive thinking. …
This week, Point of Inquiry is delighted to welcome Ann Druyan, co-writer and co-creator of both the original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, starring her late husband Carl Sagan, as well as the new series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, starring Neil deGrasse Tyson. In a wide-ranging discussion, Druyan talks to Josh Zepps about how the first Cosmos series came to be, her efforts to …
This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Meredith Dank, PhD, Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute. Dank is the co-principal investigator on several international and domestic human trafficking projects, including the new study, “Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major US Cities”, which attempts to put dollar figures on prostitution in Atlanta, …
Following the death of the Westboro Baptist Church’s Fred Phelps, Josh Zepps discusses the state of religious fundamentalism with Frank Schaeffer, the New York Times bestselling author of Crazy for God: How I grew up as one of the Elect, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics– and How I learned to love …