Monthly Archives: January 2016

Film review: THE REVENANT

From Facebook, 10jan16: Today we went to see THE REVENANT, the film with Leonardo DiCaprio as an 1820s fur trader in the American northwest, mauled by a bear and left for dead by his compatriots, who manages to survive and … Continue reading

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Links and Comments: Conspiracy Theories, Cognitive Biases; Changing Minds; All Stories

Catching up on links and comments from this past week. First, a couple book reviews in last Sunday’s NY Times Book Review. First, a review by Adrian Chen of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Rob Brotherton. Subtitle: … Continue reading

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Film Review: Room

Room is an incredibly powerful film, both on its own terms as a harrowing story of a mother and her 5-year-old son trapped inside a single room for the boy’s entire life, and for its metaphoric weight (which I admit … Continue reading

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Link and Comment: Terrorism and Republican Fear-Mongering

Jerry Coyne points to an essay by Lawrence Krauss, in The New Yorker: Thinking Rationally About Terror. Krauss’ essay addresses the fairly obvious fact that incidents of ‘terrorism’, despite the publicity they get and panic they trigger, are very rare … Continue reading

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Link and Comment: The Year in Religion, and Adults

Salon, Jeffrey Tayler: Religious delusions are destroying us: “Nothing more than man-made contrivances of domination and submission”. Subtitle: “We managed a year of Charlie Hebdo, Franklin Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Duggar and more creationism. To sanity in 2016” An unfortunately … Continue reading

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Review of David Silverman

The book is FIGHTING GOD: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World, just published in December 2015, and I’m not linking it with a cover image as I often do with books I review, since I can’t especially approve of … Continue reading

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Film review: BRIDGE OF SPIES

From Facebook, 3jan16: Today’s movie: “Bridge of Spies”, seen belatedly, nearly 3 months after it was released. (We saw it at the last theater still showing it anywhere in the Bay Area, an independent in Berkeley — another nice, old-fashioned … Continue reading

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Film review: THE BIG SHORT

From Facebook, 2jan16: Today’s movie: “The Big Short”, about as riveting and even emotional as you could possibly imagine a film about the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 could possibly be. It stars Steve Carell, Christian Bale (as an … Continue reading

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