Point of Inquiry
By Center for Inquiry
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Description
Point of Inquiry is the Center for Inquiry's flagship podcast, where the brightest minds of our time sound off on all the things you're not supposed to talk about at the dinner table: science, religion, and politics. Guests have included Brian Greene, Susan Jacoby, Richard Dawkins, Ann Druyan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugenie Scott, Adam Savage, Bill Nye, and Francis Collins. Point of Inquiry is produced at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y.
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CleanDavid Silverman: The Relentless Ascent of Atheism | David Silverman, president of American Atheists, was recently seen on championing the importance of the atheist vote to American conservatives on the late night comedy show,... | 4/4/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSurviving Death: Ann Neumann on the Ethical Landscape of Dying | Many of us picture our dying moments as being surrounded by loved ones, uttering last words of gratitude and advice before we slip off into a peaceful departure. Yet the reality is that dying is often a long, painful, and constantly... | 3/28/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe Odds of Life’s Oddities, with Mathematician John Allen Paulos | John Allen Paulos is an award winning mathematician and best selling author. A professor in mathematics at Temple University, he has written for The Guardian, CFI’s Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and... | 3/21/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFormer White Supremacist Arno Michaelis: Understanding Hate, Overcoming Fear | Today’s guest is former white supremacist Arno Michaelis, author of My Life After Hate. A leader within what he called a “racial holy war," Michaelis later realized his hate was misplaced, the product of fear,... | 3/15/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
CleanCensorship in the Islamic World, Through the Eyes of Journalist Jessica Davey-Quantick | We know more and more about how repressive attitudes about blasphemy and religious criticism in parts of the Islamic world can become explosive, as with the Charlie Hebdo attacks or the murder of secularist bloggers in Bangladesh. But these... | 2/29/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanCan't Help Helping: Larissa MacFarquhar on Attitudes Toward Altruism | Most of us have no problem operating under the notion that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us. But what do we make of people who do go well beyond that, while asking for nothing in return? Why are often perplexed by... | 2/23/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSex and the Safely Satisfied, with Jaclyn Friedman (Valentine's Day Special) | Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, speaker, and sex education activist, challenging misconceptions about what it means to have consenting, satisfying sex. She’s the author of What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s... | 2/14/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRobyn Blumner and Ronald A. Lindsay: A Joining of Forces, a Passing of the Torch | The freethought movement has seen two of its most respected and influential institutions combine into what has been called a “supergroup” for secularism. The Center for Inquiry, the organization that proudly produces this... | 2/8/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
CleanAthens' Atheists: Tim Whitmarsh on Religious Doubt in Ancient Greece | In ancient Greece, did everyone unquestioningly believe in the gods of Olympus? Was there no one in classical Athens to write the equivalent of “The Zeus Delusion”? According to our guest this week, the Greeks’ religious... | 2/1/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJudaism for Nones: Millennials and God, with Rabbi Mark Wildes | The “nones” are on the rise in the U.S. with 33 million Americans identifying as having no religious affiliation. Atheists shouldn’t get too excited, though, because 68% of the unaffiliated indicate that they do believe in... | 1/25/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
CleanAvoiding the TRAP: Defending Legal Abortion, with David A. Grimes, M.D. | This week Point of Inquiry welcomes Dr. David Grimes, a board certified physician in obstetrics and gynecology and author of the new book Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation. Dr. Grimes... | 1/19/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanReligious Belief, Naturally Selected - with John C. Wathey | Throughout history, humans have looked to religion to explain why the world is the way it is. Thanks to the development of science, we now have more concrete ways of understanding the world, ways that do not rely on faith. Despite our... | 1/12/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRetconning Christmas: David Kyle Johnson on the Real Reason for the Season | During the perennial War on Christmas, certain Christians often feel the need to remind the rest pf us what the holiday season is really about. It’s Jesus Christ’s birthday and we’re all invited to the party… if by... | 12/7/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitIslam, Paris, and Polarization - with Michael Brooks | After the Paris attacks, tensions are running higher than they have in many years over the threat posed by Islamism, how we should talk about it, and how policy should respond to it. One of our most difficult cultural challenges is... | 11/30/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
CleanNo, This Podcast is Not About You: David Laporte on the Proliferation of Paranoia | You don’t have to be paranoid to recognize that privacy isn’t what it used to be. The government can get access to our phone calls and emails, video surveillance is becoming a norm in public places, and nearly everyone has the... | 11/23/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSteve Silberman: Evolving Attitudes Toward Autism | It used to be that autism was considered to be the result of poor parenting, but starting in the 1930s, it was understood to be a hereditary condition, and the behaviors often associated with autism turn out to be present, to one... | 11/17/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMexico’s Drug Policy in Flux, with Sylvia Longmire | Is smoking pot a fundamental human right? On Wednesday, November 4th Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that four individuals involved in a private cannabis club have the constitutional right to grow, sell, and smoke cannabis based... | 11/10/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanConjuring Rose: Joe Nickell’s Annual Houdini Séance (Halloween Extra) | Most people know Harry Houdini as the world famous magician and illusionist, but in addition to his life as a performer, Houdini was also known to have a deep fascination with the afterlife. So much so he spent the later part of... | 10/31/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSarah Posner: Trump, Carson, and the Religious Right in 2016 | This week Josh Zepps chats about the 2016 Republican presidential primaries with journalist Sarah Posner, a senior correspondent for Religion Dispatches and the author of Gods Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the... | 10/27/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTaste the Science! - Serious Eats' J. Kenji López-Alt | Myths and pseudoscience do not only apply to the realms of religion, alternative medicine, and the paranormal. One area of our lives in which science and a little myth-busting can do enormous good... | 10/19/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPutting Kids First: Sarah Levin and Ed Beck on Vaccine Laws | With misinformation about vaccines proliferating among certain groups in the U.S., diseases that had previously been thought eradicated are creeping back into American life. As far as the law is concerned, whether or not a parent chooses to... | 10/12/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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22 |
CleanThe Mysteries of Parkinson’s, with Jon Palfreman | Brains, the means by which we scrutinize our world, are themselves inscrutable, and no more so than when things are going wrong. Just ask our guest this week, award winning medical journalist Jon Palfreman. After spending years of his... | 10/5/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTrials and Textbooks: Jeffrey Selman on Fighting Creationism in Schools | When the public school board in Cobb County, Georgia, placed a disclaimer describing evolution as “just a theory” (in the non-scientific sense) and not a fact, citizen and author Jeffrey Selman knew he had to take a stand for... | 9/29/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanKeep ‘Em Separated: Rev. Barry Lynn on God and Government | One of the United States’ most prominent and respected advocates for secularism is a reverend, and that of course is our guest this week, Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Few... | 9/21/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanCraig Unger on the U.S. and Saudi Arabia: Frenemies 14 Years after 9/11 | Last week marked 14 years since the attacks of 9/11, the reverberations of which will certainly be felt well into the future. But for all the impact and tragedy of the attacks, there is still so much that remains unanswered, and unanswered... | 9/14/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanInvisible Catastrophes: Erik Loomis on the Consequences of Outsourcing | Corporate outsourcing is so common in the U.S. that it’s become exceedingly difficult to avoid consuming products made by unregulated and unethical means. But this has not always been the norm, as several decades ago America’s... | 9/8/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe City is Still Drowning: Gary Rivlin on New Orleans Ten Years After Katrina | Ten years ago on August 29, 2005, nearly 80 percent of New Orleans found itself underwater. Over the following months, the New York Times sent its correspondent Gary Rivlin to live in New Orleans and report on... | 8/31/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanEugenie Scott: Decrypting Pseudoscience | Our very special guest on Point of Inquiry this week is Eugenie Scott, the former director of the National Center for Science Education who has been waging and winning battles against creationism and pseudoscience for... | 8/24/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBred to Suffer: Paul Shapiro on Animals in Factory Farming | Happy cows and chickens grazing in pastures, we see them plastered all over our milk and egg cartons at the grocery store. While most of us realize these images are more marketing than reality, the truth about how animals are treated in... | 8/17/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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30 |
CleanDealing with Distraction in the Modern World, with Matt Crawford | Every year technology produces more innovative ways to entertain us. Everything from Twitter to Candy Crush and from billboards to viral commercials, the information that engrosses us on a daily basis makes dull tasks such as waiting in... | 8/10/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitTa-Nehisi Coates: A Country Built on Black Bodies | This week on Point of Inquiry, our guest is Ta-Nehisi Coates, a renowned journalist and celebrated essayist on culture, history, and politics. He’s a senior editor at The Atlantic, where last... | 8/3/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanStephen M. Walt: Learning to Live with the Islamic State | As difficult it is to accept, there may be no loosening of the grip ISIS currently holds over its territory, at least not any time soon. Our guest, Stephen M. Walt, begins to come to terms with this unpleasant situation in a new article for... | 7/28/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPatient Autonomy and Shifting Medical Ethics, with Dr. Barron Lerner | This week, Lindsay Beyerstein chats with medical ethicist Dr. Barron Lerner, author of the new book The Good Doctor: A Father, A Son and the Evolution of Medical Ethics. Lerner’s father Myer Lerner was a renowned... | 7/20/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRadical Nationalism in Greece and the Romance of “No,” with Daphne Halikiopoulou | On July 5th, 2015 Greece said no to a bailout and austerity measures that would have kept them in the eurozone, lending more uncertainty to an already weakened financial structure. The country that birthed Western democracy has found itself... | 7/14/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTaslima Nasrin: A Woman of Courage without a Country | Taslima Nasrin is a world-renowned author and secular activist from Bangladesh. A physician by training, she has written a plethora of novels, poems and papers standing for the rights of women and criticizing religious extremism.... | 7/6/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBangladeshi Blogger Asif Mohiuddin: Attacked, Imprisoned, and Undeterred | This week we welcome Bangladeshi atheist blogger and social activist, Asif Mohiuddin, for a special episode of Point of Inquiry, recorded before a live audience at the Center for Inquiry’s Reason for Change... | 6/29/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRichard Dawkins: LIVE at the Reason for Change Conference | This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Richard Dawkins for a special episode recorded before a live audience at the Center for Inquiry’s Reason for Change conference in Buffalo, New York on June 13,... | 6/22/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanOverwhelmed by Celebrity Culture, with Tim Caulfield | Celebrities have always played an oversized role in our culture, and there’s nothing new about them using their star power to endorse ideas or products. But we now live in a time in which mass media consumption is greater than ever... | 6/15/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAnti-Abortion Terrorism and Free Speech, with David Cohen | Opponents of abortion have been largely successful in wielding the First Amendment in their fight to protest abortion providers and patients, and according to this week’s guest, this freedom has too often resulted in the terrorization... | 6/8/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe Benefits of Religion Without the Belief, with Jeff Rasely | Religion is a very comforting aspect of many people’s lives, providing a community of like-minded individuals, as well as more than a little nostalgia. But even within the same faith groups, one can almost always find tension over... | 6/1/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMichael Specter on the Gluten-Free Fad | This week on Point of Inquiry, Lindsay Beyerstein is joined by renowned journalist Michael Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker, to talk about the subject of his award-winning... | 5/26/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAlex Garland: Ex Machina and the Question of Consciousness | Ex Machina, a new film that tells the story of a billionaire programmer who creates an artificially intelligent female robot, is in theaters now, and its writer and director, Alex Garland, is our special guest... | 5/18/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanClearing Up the Calorie: The Science of Nutrition, with Marion Nestle | When over one-third of American adults are obese, it’s no wonder that our culture is deluged with fad diets and alleged miracle supplements. Everyone is looking for the easiest way to obtain and maintain health but it’s no small... | 5/11/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAdvice for the Teenage Atheist, with David Seidman | There are dozens of bestselling books on spirituality for teens (and many more not on the bestseller list), and many books on atheism as well. But, surprisingly, books about atheism and agnosticism specifically for young people are rare... | 5/4/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPeter Singer: Maximizing Morality with Reason | Peter Singer has revolutionized the way we think about morals and values. He’s lead the way in providing evidence for some of the toughest moral controversies such as animal rights, abortion, and wealth inequality. Singer’s newest book is... | 4/27/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe Misinterpretations of the Supreme Court, with Ian Millhiser | Our guest this week says that the U.S. Supreme Court’s power to interpret the Constitution is so great that they can use it to justify nearly anything they please. Even the American founders who forged the Constitution often had... | 4/20/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBassem Youssef and Ahmed Ahmed: The Risk and Rewards of Satire | While Bassem Youssef’s satirical voice has made him widely known as the Egyptian Jon Stewart, merely five years ago Youssef was a heart surgeon broadcasting humorous political commentary on YouTube from his laundry room. His videos soon exploded... | 4/13/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPhil Zuckerman: Those Normal, Upstanding Nonbelievers | Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology at Pitzer College, and among the world's leading experts in the growing field of secular studies, with a deep understanding of how people's lives are lived without religion. He’s the author... | 4/6/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRealpolitik and America's Conflict with Iran, with Joint Chiefs of Staff Advisor David Crist | Negotiations between Iran and the U.S. in concert with Germany and the United Nations Security Council are set to result in an agreement on March 31, 2015 regarding Iran’s nuclear program, potentially restricting Iran’s nuclear... | 3/30/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJohann Hari: The Falsehoods of Addiction and The War on Drugs | Billions of dollars are funneled into federal drug programs to keep our children away from drugs and our cities safe from crime and economic turmoil. Our guest this week, journalist and author Johann Hari, has spent the last several years... | 3/23/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe World Human Extinction Will Leave Behind, with Michael Tennesen | As climate change progresses and takes its toll on the planet, the life forms we share it with continue to evolve and adapt. Some species thrive while many face imminent extinction. What we often fail to realize as humans is... | 3/16/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanEli Lake: How Islamic is 'Islamic Extremism'? | This week on Point of Inquiry, Josh Zepps talks to Eli Lake, a journalist with extensive experience covering international intelligence, diplomacy, and the recent conflicts in the Muslim world. With the Islamic State now eclipsing Al Qaeda as a... | 3/9/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFalse Memories Creating False Criminals, with Dr. Julia Shaw | Memory is remarkably fallible, as we often frustrate ourselves with how certain we are about where we left our car keys only to realize how entirely wrong we were. But could it be that our memories are so easily corrupted that we could be led to... | 3/2/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLeighann Lord: Courageous Comedy as a Safe Space | This week on a special episode highlighting the upcoming Reason for Change conference, Point of Inquiry welcomes stand up comedian Leighann Lord. Talking with show producer Nora Hurley, they discuss how the worlds of comedy and skepticism... | 2/23/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLaci Green: Truths and Myths about Sex and Love | This week Point of Inquiry welcomes Laci Green for a special tell-all Valentine's Day episode. Green is a popular Youtube video blogger, sex education activist and feminist. In a time when sex pervades popular culture and marketing, and yet rarely... | 2/14/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLetting Go of the Soul, with Julien Musolino | Intuitively, it can feel as though the essence of our thoughts and feelings exists separate from the body and brain, and that essence is what is normally referred to as the soul. Empirical evidence, however, forces us to reconcile our intuitions with... | 2/9/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPaul Offit, MD, on Measles in the Magic Kingdom and the Anti-Vaccine Movement | Measles are the newest attraction at Disneyland this season, and unfortunately the only thing magical about them is how quickly they’ve begun to spread throughout California and Arizona. Although measles were eliminated in the U.S. by 2000, the... | 2/2/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe Women Spies of the Civil War, with Karen Abbott | This week on Point of inquiry, New York Times bestselling author Karen Abbott talks to Lindsay Beyerstein about her newest book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, which tells the true story of four women who served as spies during the... | 1/20/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBefore Charlie Hebdo: The Danish Cartoons that Shook the world, with Jytte Klausen | The terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo was a human atrocity, as well as an assault on free expression. Yet numerous prominent news publications are still refusing to show the very Hebdo cartoons at the center of the story. Last year, in the... | 1/12/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPenalizing Pregnancy: Lynn Paltrow on the Fight for Reproductive Justice | The effort to overturn Roe v. Wade and criminalize abortion has spiraled into challenging not only women’s right to abortion, but a women’s right to carry her baby to term. Across the country, women who seek medical help for... | 1/5/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanChristmas Extra: Tom Flynn’s 30th Year of Anti-ClausingTom Flynn is Executive Director of The Council for Secular Humanism | Tom Flynn is Executive Director of The Council for Secular Humanism, Editor of Free Inquiry magazine, as well as professional anti-Christmas advocate and author of “The Trouble with Christmas.” Tom is on his 30th year of... | 12/25/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanGreta Christina on Coping with Death, No Afterlife Required | Our Guest this week is Greta Christina, popular atheist blogger, speaker and author of several books on atheism including her newest, “Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do With God.” Christina discusses with... | 12/22/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFrank Schaeffer on Cynicism and Paranoia in the "War on Christmas" | Fox News’ "War on Christmas" is already in full swing, as Bill O’Reilly wasted no time jumping into battle this year to defend the holiday from the great secular menace. However, it looks like Bill might be able to leave the trenches a... | 12/16/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRonald A. Lindsay: Why God Can't Tell Us What to Do | Despite the fact that the United States was founded as a secular state, government neutrality toward religion remains a tumultuous and controversial issue -- a conversation-stopper in most public policy discussions. This week on the show, Lindsay... | 12/8/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDeciphering Alan Turing, with Andrew Hodges | Alan Turing was a true visionary. Founding what we understand today as computer science, he was also a mathematician, a philosopher, and an early trailblazer for gay equality. Without his genius for codebreaking, the Second World War might have gone... | 12/1/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanGetting Over Racial Anxiety, with Rachel D. Godsil | As a nation, the U.S. prides itself on at least aspiring to the ideal of equality, even if it often falls short. The educational, health care, and legal systems, are plagued by institutional biases against racial minorities. The good news is that... | 11/24/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSurviving Saddam and Confronting Islam, with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar | As the threat posed by radical Islamists like those of ISIS grows in popular awareness, Islam itself becomes more of a target for criticism; some of it fair, and some of it based in ignorance or bigotry. Can efforts to defend Islam and Muslims from... | 11/19/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSteven Pinker: Using Grammar as a Tool, Not as a Weapon | The English language is often treated as delicate and precious, and disagreements about what is “proper English” go back as far as the 18th century. Then as now, style manuals and grammar books placed innumerable restrictions on what is... | 11/10/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanEbola in the Age of Epidemics - Special Live Episode | There’s no doubt that Ebola is an incredibly dangerous and genuinely lethal virus, but it’s also a highly manageable one, though you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise given the kind of hyperbolic coverage we’ve seen of the... | 11/3/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanHalloween Extra: 18th Annual Houdini Séance with Joe Nickell | Harry Houdini, the most famous illusionist the world has ever known, spent the later part of his career fascinated with spiritualists and mediums. This led him to become a dedicated skeptic and investigator. In this special Halloween episode... | 10/31/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPro-Choice Without Apology, with Katha Pollitt | Given the divisive nature of the debates over abortion, the subject is understandably not the best table-talk material. But despite the fact that abortion is a normal and often necessary (one in three women will have an abortion before menopause),... | 10/22/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe Human Impact of Discovering Alien Life, with Astrobiologist Steven J. Dick | Our universe is made up of billions of galaxies. The cosmos is so mind-bogglingly vast, that it’s hard not to suppose that we aren’t alone, that life must exist somewhere else besides our own planet. Last month, some of the... | 10/14/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe Theology of ISIS, with Dr. Adam Silverman | The rise of ISIS, the self proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has sparked debate about the role of religion — specifically Islam — in violent extremism. This week, Dr. Adam Silverman offers us a glimpse into the theology of ISIS,... | 10/6/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAustin Dacey | The Future of Blasphemy | 9/29/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMark Oppenheimer on Misogyny in the Freethought Community | This week Point of Inquiry welcomes journalist Mark Oppenheimer. Mark writes the Beliefs column for the New York Times, and is the author of the e-book The Zen Predator of The Upper East Side. He is an expert on how religious and philosophical... | 9/22/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFactory Farming and the Meat Racket: Christopher Leonard on our Irrational Meat Industry | It’s National Chicken Month! But rather than celebrating the consumption of fowl, Point of Inquiry is asking what exactly is going on in America's meat industry? Is the way we consume meat at all rational? Joining us this... | 9/17/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAsk a Mortician: Caitlin Doughty on the Death Industry's Dirty Secrets | Point of Inquiry welcomes Caitlin Doughty, creator of the cult classic web series Ask A Mortician, which gives unvarnished answers to questions about dead bodies and the death industry. Caitlin has tackled topics ranging from "What to say to a... | 9/8/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSam Harris: Seeking Transcendence Without Religion | It’s been ten years since the publication of Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith kicked off the cultural phenomenon of “new atheism,” bringing frank criticism of religion into mainstream conversation. In the decade... | 9/2/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDr. Adia Benton on The West African Ebola Outbreak | This week Point Of Inquiry welcomes Dr. Adia Benton, a professor of medical anthropology at Brown University. She joins host Lindsay Beyerstein to talk about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.Medical anthropologists bring a unique expertise... | 8/25/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPaul Offit, MD - Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine | Point of Inquiry's hosts are off this week, so we're running Lindsay Beyerstein's excellent interview from earlier this year with Dr. Paul Offit. Dr. Offit will be the Center for Inquiry's special guest on September 6th in Amherst, NY, as he is... | 8/18/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanChristopher Capozzola: 100 Years After the Great War, Lessons in Reason | One hundred years ago, Great Britain declared war on Germany, joining in what we now refer to as World War I, a conflict which cost more than 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians their lives, and shaped the the world we know today. How did... | 8/11/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLaurel Braitman on Animals and Mental Illness | This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Laurel Braitman, a TED fellow with a PhD in History and Anthropology of Science from MIT, and the author of Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand... | 8/4/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDavid Ropeik: Airplane Disasters and the Psychology of Risk | How do we rationally assess risk? Following a terrible series of horrifying air travel disasters, reasonable people begin to question what we consider to be "safe." But should we? To answer this question, our host Josh Zepps is joined... | 7/29/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJason Horowitz: Protecting the Whales from the U.S. Navy | On March 15, 2000, over a dozen whales beached themselves in the Bahamas in one of the largest multi-species strandings in history. Suspicion turned to U.S. Navy sonar, but at first there was no proof. This revelation brings us into the detective... | 7/21/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAustin Dacey - The U.N. and Defamation of Religions | Point of Inquiry is taking a week off and filling in with a classic episode. After Saudi Arabia recently tried to silence the Center For Inquiry's UN representative, Josephine Macintosh, as she delivered a statement critical of their... | 7/14/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe Gospel According to Hobby Lobby--With Brian Leiter | To discuss last week's Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Point of Inquiry welcomes Dr. Brian Leiter, law professor and philosopher at the University of Chicago. He's the author of several books including Why Tolerate Religion?. He... | 7/7/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMontel Williams: Leading a Surge on the Veterans Administration | Best known for his 17 years as a talk show host, Montel Williams is now bringing his name and dynamic personality to activism on behalf of U.S. servicemen and women. Raised during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and into the tumultuous... | 7/2/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMarlene Zuk: The Paleo Delusion | We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in caves rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than wear sneakers—or did we? These, along with many other questions about what is or is not "natural" for humans from an evolutionary... | 6/23/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanHoward Fineman on Eric Cantor's Defeat and the Battle for the Soul of the GOP | Few intra-party political battles have been as astonishing and unexpected as last week's primary loss by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to religious-conservative challenger David Brat, who was quickly embraced by the Tea Party after his victory. To... | 6/16/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJanet Mock, Redefining Realness, Biology, Sex and Gender | This week POI welcomes bestselling author and trans rights activist, Janet Mock. Janet is the author of the new memoir Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More, which recounts her emotional and physical... | 6/9/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanNegin Farsad: Red States and Muslim Comedy | This week, we welcome Negin Farsad, a groundbreaking Iranian American comedian. A TED speaker and TED Fellow, she was named one of the Huffington Post's 50 Funniest Women. She's been seen on Comedy Central, MTV, CNN, MSNBC, and in... | 6/3/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanCapital Punishment in Crisis with Dahlia Lithwick | 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... | 5/27/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFarzana Hassan on Islamic Extremism and the Boko Haram | 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... | 5/20/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanScience Denialism with Donald Prothero | 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... | 5/12/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTalking Nerdy (And Ethically) with Cara Santa Maria | 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... | 5/5/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanComing Out Atheist - Greta Christina | 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... | 4/28/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanA Trek Through Skepticism with The Amazing Randi | 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... | 4/21/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLiving with a Wild God: Barbara Ehrenreich, Atheism, and Transcendence | 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... | 4/14/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAnn Druyan: Telling the Story of the Cosmos | 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... | 4/7/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanInvestigating the Oldest Profession: Prostitution and Science Meet, with Meredith Dank of the Urban Institute | 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... | 3/31/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFrank Schaeffer on Escaping Fundamentalism, and the Death of Fred Phelps | 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... | 3/24/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanCancer Quack Stanislaw Burzynski: Exposed | This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes David Gorski, MD, PhD: cancer researcher, surgeon, and managing editor of the Science-Based Medicine blog, aka "Orac" of Respectful Insolence. Gorski and Beyerstein... | 3/17/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe Philosophy of Belief with Rebecca Goldstein | Rebecca Goldstein, a professor of philosophy and the author of five novels and a collection of short stories, joins us on Point of Inquiry to discuss atheism, philosophy and her new book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy... | 3/10/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDaniel Loxton: Bigfoot, Nessie and Other Kinds of “Abominable Science” | This week Point of Inquiry welcomes Daniel Loxton, longtime Editor of Junior Skeptic, the 10-page kids' science section bound within Skeptic magazine, author and illustrator of the national award-winning kids' science book Evolution: How We... | 3/3/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanGabriel Sherman - The Loudest Voice in the Room : How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Countr | This week Point of Inquiry welcomes Gabriel Sherman, writer and contributing editor for New York Magazine and author of the new book The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News - and... | 2/24/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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106 |
CleanAmy Tuteur, MD | The Skeptical OB | 2/17/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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107 |
CleanStanton Peele, PhD - Addiction and Recovery | This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Stanton Peele, PhD., J.D.. Dr. Peele, an addiction expert and author of 12 books on the subject, discusses his views on the current ‘disease model’ view of addiction and the recent tragedy involving... | 2/10/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanGreg Dworkin, MD - Founding Editor of Flu Wiki | This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Greg Dworkin, MD. Dr. Dworkin is a founding editor of Flu Wiki (http://fluwiki.info.) an international, wiki-format clearinghouse of Influenza information designed to help local communities prepare for and perhaps... | 2/4/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJ.R. Havlan - Writer for The Daily Show | This week Point of Inquiry discusses satire in politics and American life with J.R. Havlan, eight-time Emmy Award winning writer on The Daily Show. J.R. was previously a stand-up comic, including a stint doing crowd warm-up... | 1/28/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJason Stanley - Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy? | This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and co-author of a provocative essay in last week’s New York Times entitled Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy? Dr. Stanley and his... | 1/21/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanArthur Caplan, PhD - Ethics of Brain Death, end of life, the State and the Right | This week Point of Inquiry is discussing Death. Specifically, Brain death and the efforts of some areas of the religious right and their attempts to eliminate whole brain Brain Death as the legal standard for death in America. To aid in... | 1/14/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanChris Emden - Hip Hop Archivist and Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University | This week on Point of Inquiry we welcome Chris Emden, a Columbia Professor who's helped design New York City's public school policy, a leading science education researcher, and Harvard Hip Hop Archive Fellow. Chris Emden is a favored guest of Josh... | 1/6/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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113 |
CleanThe War on Christmas | As the War on Christmas wages on, our host, Josh Zepps, interviews Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst for American's United for the Separation of Church and State, Editor of Church & State magazine and author of Close Encounters with... | 12/30/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanKathryn Joyce - The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption | Joining Lindsay Bernstein this week is Kathryn Joyce, one of the foremost reporters chronicling the Religious Right today. She made “Quiverfull” a household name with her first book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy... | 12/23/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanP.J. O'Rourke - American Satirist, Journalist and Author | This week on Point of Inquiry, Josh Zepps welcomes P.J. O’Rourke, humorist, cultural commentator, and best selling author of sixteen books. An early proponent of “gonzo journalism” and is a self-described libertarian, O’Rourke... | 12/16/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBarry W. Lynn - Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State | This week on Point of Inquiry, Lindsay Beyerstein talks with Barry Lynn, Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, and a strong advocate of... | 12/10/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanGadadhara Pandit Dasa - First Hindu Chaplain for Columbia University | This week's Point of Inquiry features Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, first ever Hindu Chaplain for Columbia University and New York University, the interfaith chaplain at Union Theological Seminary, and author of Urban Monk: Exploring Karma, Consciousness,... | 12/2/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPaul Offit, MD - Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine | This week’s guest on Point of Inquiry, Paul A. Offit, MDis best known as a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and a staunch, public supporter of vaccination and opponent of pseudoscientific alternative medicine. His most recent... | 11/25/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBill Nye The Science Guy | Famed educator, engineer and "Science Guy," Bill Nye Joins our host Josh Zepps for this week's Point of Inquiry. They discuss Bill's start as an Engineer and part time stand up comedian to his groundbreaking work in television educating a... | 11/16/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanKatherine Stewart: The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children | Point of Inquiry, the flagship podcast for the Center for Inquiry, presents a special episode recorded before a live audience at the 2013 CFI Summit in Tacoma, Washington, with new co-host Lindsay Beyerstein. The fundamentalist, Christian right's... | 11/11/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLeonard Mlodinow: Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior | Point of Inquiry, the flagship podcast of the Center for Inquiry, relaunches with a special episode recorded before a live audience at the 2013 CFI Summit in Tacoma, Washington, with new co-host Josh Zepps of HuffPost Live.Our unconscious minds offer... | 11/5/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanNeil deGrasse Tyson - Communicating Science | 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... | 9/30/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBill Nye - In Praise of Reason (and Skepticism) | 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... | 9/10/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos | 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... | 8/19/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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125 |
CleanTemple Grandin - The Science of Livestock Animal Welfare | 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... | 8/12/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSusan Jacoby - American Freethought Heritage | 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... | 8/5/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanNeil deGrasse Tyson - Communicating Science to the Public | 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... | 7/29/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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128 |
CleanEthan Zuckerman - Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection | 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... | 6/24/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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129 |
CleanMario Livio - Brilliant Blunders From Darwin to Einstein | 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.... | 6/19/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDaniel Dennett - Tools for Thinking | 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,... | 6/11/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanStephan Lewandowsky - The Mind of the Conspiracy Theorist | 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... | 6/4/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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132 |
CleanKatha Pollitt - Is Religion Inherently Sexist? | 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... | 5/22/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMichael Levi - Fracking, Pipelines, and Science | 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... | 5/14/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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134 |
CleanJared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday | 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... | 5/7/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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135 |
CleanMary Roach - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal | 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... | 4/30/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanScott Atran - What Makes a Terrorist? | 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... | 4/23/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanNeil Gross - Why Are Professors (and Scientists) So Liberal? | 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... | 4/16/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanA.C. Grayling - The God Argument | 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... | 4/9/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFrans de Waal - The Bonobo and the Atheist | 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... | 4/2/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanCarol Tavris - The Science of Sex and Gender | 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... | 3/26/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAmanda Marcotte - Skepticism Needs Feminism | 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,... | 3/18/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMark Lynas - Science and the Left | 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... | 3/4/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMatthew Hutson - The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking | 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... | 2/28/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPoint of Inquiry Live | Steven Pinker - The Decline of Violence | 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... | 2/20/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSusan Jacoby - Freethought’s Forgotten Hero | 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... | 2/12/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanCarl Zimmer - Viruses and Other Little Things | 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... | 2/5/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPaul Krugman - Science and Pseudoscience in Economics | 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... | 1/28/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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148 |
CleanSean Carroll - The Particle at the End of the Universe | 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... | 1/22/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMaria Konnikova - How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes | 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... | 1/14/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPhil Plait - #Notpocalypse! | 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.... | 1/7/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanScott Sigler - Encouraging Critical Thinking Through Science Fiction | 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... | 1/1/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRonald A. Lindsay and Michael De Dora - Mr. Science Goes to Washington | 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... | 12/26/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDavid Brin - Uplifting Existence | 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... | 12/19/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBill McKibben - Do the Math | Host: Chris Mooney When we last had Bill McKibben on this show in 2010, I was mainly treating him as another bestselling science author—one who happens to focus on climate change. Well. Something kinda big happened in the intervening... | 12/13/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSamuel Arbesman - The Half-Life of Facts | Host: Indre Viskontas Because we live in an uncertain world, we arm ourselves with facts to gain a sense of control and therefore some modicum of comfort. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow even though it disappears tonight. But what happens when... | 12/4/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSteven Novella - Exposing Medical Nonsense | Host: Chris Mooney One of the first people I ever got to know in skepticism was Steven Novella. He was a professor at Yale, just starting out as an organized skeptic—I was a student, just getting fired up about the same stuff. Since then, Steve... | 11/27/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMichael Gordin - The Pseudoscience Wars | Host: Chris Mooney Before the "complementary and alternative medicine" fad, and before UFO craze, lived a man whom you might call the first modern pseudoscientist. His name was Immanuel Velikovsky. He had a strange theory about a comet—that... | 11/19/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJacques Berlinerblau - How to Be Secular | Host: Chris Mooney On this show, we often debate the state of American secularism—covering topics like the rise of the so-called "nones," or the unending battle to rescue the country from the pernicious influence of Christian right. Our guest... | 11/12/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanOliver Sacks - Hallucinations | Host: Indre Viskotnas Despite our individual differences, highlighted especially during an election, much of what we see, hear, smell or feel is shareable: that is, when standing in front of an object, we can more or less agree that it has a... | 11/5/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitSpecial Double Episode: Jon Ronson and Richard Wiseman, with Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney | Hosts: Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney At the 2012 CSICON conference in Nashville, Tennessee, your Point of Inquiry hosts Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney finally actually found themselves in the same place. The result was a show that features both... | 10/31/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBruce Hood - Superstitions in Baseball | Host: Indre Viskontas The month of October is associated with falling leaves, autumn winds and hallowe'en. But for sports fans in the US, it also signals a high point in America's national pastime: baseball's postseason. After a long run of 162 games,... | 10/22/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanScience and the 2012 Election - Shawn Otto and Matthew Chapman | Host: Chris Mooney In this show, we talk to two founders of ScienceDebate, a nonprofit organization that in the last two election cycles has pushed to get the presidential candidates to talk about and debate science policy. So far, there has been no... | 10/15/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLisa Randall - Knocking on Heaven’s Door | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Lisa Randall, the Harvard theoretical physicist and one of the most heavily cited and influential researchers in her field. She's a member of a number of distinguished scientific societies, including the... | 10/8/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMassimo Pigliucci - Living Philosophically | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is a return guest of the show, Massimo Pigliucci. We last heard about his book Nonsense on Stilts, which was about how to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. But his newest effort is in some... | 10/1/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDan Ariely - The Honest Truth about Dishonesty | Host: Indre Viskontas There is no doubt that our world is populated with cheats and liars. Most of us, slaves to the availability heuristic, think of major cheaters like Bernie Madoff, Tiger Woods, and Barry Bonds as inflicting the most damage onto... | 9/24/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPhil Zuckerman - The Sociology of Irreligion | Host: Chris Mooney How many atheists are there in the world? Where do they live? What kind of people are they, and how do they get that way? Are they happy? Are they prosperous? Do they drag their societies down into a cesspool of immortality—as... | 9/17/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRick Hayes-Roth - TruthMarket | Host: Chris Mooney Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to make American politics just a little more rational, just a little more evidence based? Wouldn't it be even nicer if there was a website, or an app, that helped that process along? Maybe,... | 9/10/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPeter Ditto - Morals, Facts, and Libertarians | Host: Chris Mooney Several times on this show, we've discussed the topic of ideological asymmetry. In other words, are people of all political persuasions equally biased, equally prone to reasoning based on their emotions to support prior... | 9/4/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTemple Grandin - The Science of Livestock Animal Welfare | Host: Indre Viskontas 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... | 8/28/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanArie Kruglanski - The Science of Closed-Mindedness | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Arie Kruglanski. He's a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland College Park, and has been a pioneer in the study of closed-mindedness-or, the "need for... | 8/21/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJoe Romm - Language Intelligence | Host: Chris Mooney This week's guest is Joe Romm. You may know him as a top blogger on global warming and energy—but that's not why we're having him on. In an impressive show of versatility, Romm the scientist has written a book about how to... | 8/13/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPeter Montgomery - 12 Rules for Mixing Religion and Politics | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Peter Montgomery, senior fellow with People for the American Way and author of a new report entitled Twelve Rules for Mixing Religion and Politics, released last week with a new introduction by Bill... | 8/7/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanChristopher diCarlo - How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass | Host: Indre Viskontas In an election year, it is especially important that our critical thinking skills be sharply honed. We have to sift through facts, fiction, and hyperbole in order to decide who it is that should lead us for the next four... | 8/1/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanKerry Emanuel - Conservative for Climate Science | Kerry Emanuel is a leading atmospheric scientist and a self-described conservative. As a result, lately he's been at the forefront of trying to convince his ideological brethren that the science behind global warming is real. We invited Emanuel on to... | 7/24/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDavid Niose - Nonbeliever Nation | Host: Chris Mooney Can people who care about secularism take America back from the religious right? Of all the questions that concern us on this show, this is perhaps the most important, the most central, of all. And David Niose has an answer to it.... | 7/16/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTina Dupuy - Skepticism Meets Comedy | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest is Tina Dupuy—the reporter, comedian, skeptic, and editor-in-chief of the startup publication SoapBlox. Dupuy appears frequently on MSNBC, Current TV, RT and the BBC and on numerous radio shows. She has written for... | 7/9/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitSpecial In Studio Episode: Jamie Kilstein, Ed Brayton, and More | Host: Chris Mooney For this episode of Point of Inquiry, we tried something a little different. At Center for Inquiry headquarters in Amherst, NY, we filmed a special hour long program with multiple in-studio guests, including the famed... | 7/4/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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178 |
CleanStuart Firestein - How Ignorance Drives Science | Host: Indre Viskontas The idea that science moves forward by carefully peeling back layers of the onion of truth, one by one, in a deliberate fashion, is so prevalent that it borders on cliche. But the truth is that running scientific experiments... | 6/25/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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179 |
CleanChris Hayes - Twilight of the Elites | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes and editor at large of The Nation. Hayes has come out with a much anticipated new book that makes a surprising argument. It's called Twilight of the... | 6/18/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanCara Santa Maria - Talk Nerdy to Us | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Cara Santa Maria, the senior science correspondent for the Huffington Post and the personage behind its "Talk Nerdy to Me" video series. Recent topics range from cannibalism, to the non-power of positive... | 6/11/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanWill Gervais - This is Your Brain on Religion | Host: Chris Mooney In late April, a study came out in Science that really got the secular blogosphere hopping. It was a paper showing that something we've long suspected may be true—less critical thinking is associated with more... | 6/4/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanChristof Koch - Consciousness and Free Will | Host: Indre Viskontas Recently, there has been a flurry of neuroscientists declaring that free will is an illusion in the popular press. But before we can assess the extent to which we are zombies, we need to first tackle the question of what,... | 5/29/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJohan Braeckman - The Rise of Islamic Creationism | Host: Chris Mooney Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the 2012 World Skeptics Conference in Berlin. It's important to keep tabs on our skeptical and freethinking colleagues around the world, and the challenges they're facing. And in... | 5/21/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanGreta Christina - Why Are You Atheists So Angry? | Our guest this week is Greta Christina, a leading atheist blogger, speaker, and commentator, and a regular contributor to AlterNet.org. Christina is author of the new ebook Why Are You Atheists So Angry?: 99 Things that Piss Off the Godless,... | 5/14/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanM.G. Lord - The Accidental Feminist | Host: Indre Viskontas In developed countries at least, the status of women has improved considerably in the last century. But in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), they remain underrepresented in all but one field, according to a recent... | 4/30/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanNaomi Oreskes - Neoliberalism and the Denial of Global Warming | Host: Chris Mooney This week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a conference convened entitled "Science Writing in the Age of Denial." The keynote speaker was a former Point of Inquiry guest and a very popular one—Naomi Oreskes, co-author... | 4/24/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAustin Dacey - The Future of Blasphemy | Host: Chris Mooney This week, our guest is a return one: Austin Dacey. He's a philosopher, a writer, and a human rights activist, and the creator of the Impossible Music Sessions, which we featured in a past show. Austin's books include The... | 4/16/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanChris Mooney - The Republican Brain | Guest Host: John Shook In this special episode of Point of Inquiry, we interview our host himself—about his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality. From climate change to evolution, the rejection... | 4/9/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanNeil deGrasse Tyson - Space Chronicles | Host: Chris Mooney This week, Point of Inquiry is thrilled to welcome back one of our most popular guests: Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famed astrophysicist and Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Last time we had... | 4/2/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDavid Morrison - Cosmic Impact Hazard | Host: Indre Viskontas The end is nigh. 2012 is a banner year for doomsday prophecies, though there still seems to be debate concerning precisely how life as we know it will be snuffed out. Hollywood seems to prefer the 'death from the skies' scenario,... | 3/26/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind | Host: Chris Mooney Why is it that some of us are religious, some of us not... some of us liberal, some of us not? If you've been paying attention, then by now you might have noticed that this doesn't really have a lot to do with the intellectual... | 3/19/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAri Rabin-Havt - The Fox Effect | Host: Chris Mooney If there's one thing Point of Inquiry is concerned about, it's ensuring a rational, sensible conversation in politics, in public life. And you simply can't have such a conversation if the culture is awash in political, and... | 3/12/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSean Faircloth - Attack of the Theocrats | Host: Chris Mooney A common goal of freethinkers, humanists, skeptics, and atheists is to preserve Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state. But we haven't always been successful in this area—help from the courts... | 3/6/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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194 |
CleanGerald Woerlee and Susan Blackmore - Near-Death Experiences and Consciousness | Host: Indre Viskontas One of the costs of being conscious is that, once in a while, we are forced to contemplate the fact that we are mortal. Ironically, a close brush with the grim reaper leaves many people more convinced than ever that our minds are... | 2/27/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMichael Mann - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Michael Mann, the prominent climatologist and, above all, leading defender of his field—and himself—against political attacks. Mann is out with a new book this month, which details his ten year... | 2/20/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDan Kahan - The Great Ideological Asymmetry Debate | Host: Chris Mooney So who's right, factually, about politics and science? Who speaks truth, and who's just spinning? It's kind of the million dollar question. If we could actually answer it, we'd have turned political debate itself into a... well, a... | 2/13/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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197 |
CleanLawrence Krauss - A Universe from Nothing | Host: Chris Mooney We had Lawrence Krauss on Point of Inquiry less than a year ago, to discuss his recent book on the scientific works of Richard Feynman. But in order to keep up with him, we had to have him on again. Already. You see, Krauss has a... | 2/6/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrian Malow - The Science Comedian | Host: Chris Mooney Earlier this month, Point of Inquiry host Chris Mooney attended Science Online, the premiere science blogging conference, in the research triangle area. There were many science aficionados, communicators, and wonks present, but... | 1/30/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanEugenie Scott - Defending Climate Education | Host: Chris Mooney Eugenie Scott is no stranger to Point of Inquiry, or to the secular community. Her endless travails to defend the teaching of evolution have won her immense respect. And that's why, when Scott and her National Center for Science... | 1/16/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos | Host: Chris Mooney 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... | 1/2/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanStuart Robbins - The End of the World as We Know It | Host: Karen Stollznow Dr. Stuart Robbins is a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His work focuses on planetary geophysics, and he’s currently researching craters on Mars, and on the moon. Stuart received... | 12/26/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJohn Cook - The Debunking Handbook | Host: Chris Mooney How do you successfully debunk misinformation? The question is a deceptively simple one—which is precisely the problem. Debunking is easy—just refute false claims, and provide corrective information. Debunking... | 12/19/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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203 |
CleanDaniel Dennett - The Scientific Study of Religion | Guest Host: John Shook Recently, the Center for Inquiry held a conference titled "Daniel Dennett and the Scientific Study of Religion: A Celebration of the Fifth Anniversary of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon". During that... | 12/12/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRobert McCauley - Why Religion is Natural (And Science is Not) | Host: Chris Mooney Over the last decade, there have been many calls in the secular community for increased criticism of religion, and increased activism to help loosen its grip on the public. But what if the human brain itself is aligned against that... | 12/5/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanScott Gavura - Dispensing Skepticism | Host: Karen Stollznow Scott Gavura is a registered pharmacist in Ontario with a personal and professional interest in improving the way we use medication. Scott started the Science-Based Pharmacy blog in 2009 to scrutinize pharmacy... | 11/28/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJonathan Weiler - Authoritarians Versus Reality | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist and director of global studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Weiler is co-author, with Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt, of the book Authoritarianism... | 11/21/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTom Flynn - The Trouble With Christmas | Host: Robert Price Ebenezer Scrooge once called Christmas "a false and commercial holiday." Is it? Should Humanists refuse to observe it? Should they wage war on it? Should they celebrate "Sanka" versions of it like Solstice and "HumanLight"?... | 11/17/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBill Nye - In Praise of Reason (and Skepticism) | Host: Chris Mooney Recently in New Orleans, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry held the very first CSICON—the conference dedicated to scientific inquiry and critical thinking. The main honoree: Bill Nye the Science Guy, who was given CSI's... | 11/7/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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209 |
CleanSeth Shostak - ET, Call SETI | Host: Karen Stollznow Dr. Seth Shostak is the Senior Astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI). Seth is the author of Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and is well... | 10/31/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJonathan Moreno - Our New Biopolitics | Host: Chris Mooney Human cloning. Synthetic biology. Mood (and mind) altering drugs. Personalized medicine. Such topics are rarely at the top of the political agenda. Yet the changes they're causing, often below the radar, are monumental. Issues of... | 10/24/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRichard C. Johnson - Religion: The Failed Narrative | Host: Robert Price Richard C. Johnson Ph.D. is a retired chemist and serves as Treasurer for Freethought Arizona. For some 25 years, the company he founded worked with scientists and researchers in chemical analysis. Through family ties, Richard had... | 10/19/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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212 |
CleanShawn Otto - The Assault on Science | Host: Chris Mooney In recent months, political attacks on science have been back in the news. Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman even famously tweeted, "To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call... | 10/10/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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213 |
CleanCSICon - The Conference Dedicated To Scientific Inquiry And Critical Thinking | Host: Adam Isaak This October-on Halloween weekend-the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is holding a conference: CSICon. It's the latest in a line of CSI skeptics' conferences going back to what is likely the first skeptics' conference ever held,... | 10/6/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanIndre Viskontas - The Miracle Detective | Host: Karen Stollznow Indre Viskontas is a neuroscientist, a soprano, and a skeptic. She is a host of the television show The Miracle Detectives that recently aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Indre appeared as the scientific investigator pitted... | 10/3/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAustin Dacey - Rock the Theocrats | Host: Chris Mooney This coming October, in Kabul, Afghanistan—on a date, and in a location, that remain undisclosed—there will be a rock concert that's billed as the world's "first stealth music festival." It will feature rock, heavy... | 9/26/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLee Salisbury - From Faith to Critical Thinking | Host: Robert Price Lee Salisbury was at one time an up-and-coming Charismatic Christian pastor, even a healer! Then how did he wind up actively involved in the ranks of Minnesota Atheists? Often successful Christian activists simply cannot allow... | 9/19/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRachel Tabachnick - Exposing Dominionism | Host: Chris Mooney We've heard a lot in the news lately about Dominionists—Christians who believe, basically, that they ought to be running this country. Dominionism has different strains. But one is embodied in a group called the New Apostolic... | 9/12/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJohn Dodes - The Tooth About Dentistry | Host: Karen Stollznow John Dodes is a dentist with a special interest in dentistry and pseudoscience. He is one of the founding fellows of the Institute for Science in Medicine, a former President and Chairperson of the National Council Against Health... | 9/6/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanScott Atran - Violent Extremism and Sacred Values | Host: Chris Mooney In less than two weeks, the ten year anniversary of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil—9/11—will be upon us. In the past decade, there has been much debate and discussion about the root causes of terrorism and... | 8/29/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDan Barker - U-Turn on the Road to Damascus | Host: Robert Price Host Robert M. Price felt uncannily as if he were talking to himself when he interviewed Dan Barker, the two share so much in common. But then their story is not so unusual, come to think of it. The same sort of thing seems to be... | 8/22/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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221 |
CleanDid Reason Evolve For Arguing? - Hugo Mercier | Host: Chris Mooney Why are human beings simultaneously capable of reasoning, and yet so bad at it? Why do we have such faulty mechanisms as the "confirmation bias" embedded in our brains, and yet at the same time, find ourselves capable of brilliant... | 8/15/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDonald Prothero - The Psychology of Cryptozoologists | My guest this week is Donald Prothero, Professor of Geology at Occidental College, and Lecturer in Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology. Don is a distinguished academic; a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the... | 8/8/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDavid Frum and Kenneth Silber - Conservatives and Science | Host: Chris Mooney When it comes to the U.S. political right, it often appears that the opposition to science-and reason in general-is everywhere. From climate change denial to anti-evolutionism; from debt ceiling denial to, that's... | 8/1/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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224 |
CleanJaco Gericke - Confessions of a Died-Again Christian | Host: Robert Price A couple of student hecklers once reproved Marlowe's Dr. Faustus: "Faustus! Plumb the depths of that which you profess!" Many evangelical Christians have buckled down to study apologetics or biblical studies in just that... | 7/25/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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225 |
CleanRebecca Watson - Skepticism and Feminism | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Rebecca Watson, the founder of the Skepchick blog. Recently, she's been at the center of an explosive controversy over the relationship between feminism and the skeptic/atheist movement. It all... | 7/19/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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226 |
CleanRichard Wiseman - Paranormality | Host: Karen Stollznow Richard Wiseman is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in England. Richard began his career as a professional magician before pursuing a career in psychology, and developing a... | 7/11/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMatthew Chapman - The Ledge | Host: Chris Mooney It's not often that Hollywood takes up the subject of atheism directly—much less sympathetically. Even rarer is finding this in a film starring major names like Liv Tyler and Terence Howard. But that's what Matthew Chapman has... | 7/4/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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228 |
CleanD.M. Murdock - The Christ Conspiracy | Host: Robert Price D.M. Murdock, who also goes by the pen name "Acharya S.," is the author of The Christ Conspiracy, the most controversial of modern treatments of the Christ Myth theory. She has had to field flack from both apologists and... | 6/28/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRick Perlstein - Is There a Republican War on History? | Host: Chris Mooney Recently, we've seen a spate of news stories—and news incidents—involving conservative politicians and activists getting details wrong about American history. There was, most infamously, Sarah Palin saying that Paul... | 6/20/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJean Mercer - Child Development: Myths and Misunderstandings | Host: Karen Stollznow This week’s guest is Jean Mercer, a Developmental Psychologist and Professor Emerita at Richard Stockton College. She is the author of the new book Child Development: Myths and Misunderstandings. Jean writes the blog "Child... | 6/14/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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231 |
CleanMichael Shermer - The Believing Brain | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and head of the Skeptics Society, and a longtime commentator on issues relating to science, critical thinking, and the paranormal. Chris asked Michael on to... | 6/6/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanScott Lohman - Star Trek and Humanism | Host: Robert Price Do you often wish you lived in the far future? Or on a different planet? Do your friends and family think you belong there, too? Cheer up! This may not be just because you're a science fiction nerd! It may be because you espouse a... | 5/31/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJonathan Kay - Among the Truthers | Host: Chris Mooney From Birthers, to Truthers, to Deathers—to occasional Liars—America seems to be crawling right now with fevered conspiracy mongers. What's up with that? To find out, Point of Inquiry turns in this episode to Jonathan... | 5/23/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRobert Sheaffer - It's a Conspiracy | Host: Karen Stollznow Robert Sheaffer is a Committee for Skeptical Inquiry fellow and author of the "Psychic Vibrations" column for Skeptical Inquirer magazine. He writes the "Bad UFO" blog and "The Debunker's Domain" website, and is the author of The... | 5/17/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanChris Mooney - Accommodationism and the Psychology of Belief | Special Guest Host: Ronald A. Lindsay In this special episode, Chris Mooney changes places and becomes the interviewee—and then finds himself facing some probing questions from CFI President and CEO Ronald A. Lindsay. This frank interview is all... | 5/11/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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236 |
CleanBo Bennett - Christian Nontheism | Host: Robert Price Robert "Bo" Bennett wears many hats (author, motivational speaker, black belt Karate master, businessman, etc.) but manages not to have a swelled head to accommodate them! His latest book is called The Concept: Introduction to... | 5/2/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanGeorge Lakoff - Enlightenments, Old and New | Host: Chris Mooney George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist at the University of California at Berkeley. But unlike many of his scientific peers, he's known as much for his work on politics as for his research. Lakoff the famed author of many books on... | 4/25/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJosh Rosenau - The Evolution Revolution | Host: Karen Stollznow Our guest this week is Josh Rosenau, the Programs and Policy Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), and writer of the blog "Thoughts from Kansas" at ScienceBlogs. Josh has pursued a doctoral... | 4/19/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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239 |
CleanNuclear Risk and Reason - David Brenner and David Ropeik | Host: Chris Mooney When the devastating earthquake and tsunami struck Japan last month, it left behind not only mass destruction, but also a nuclear crisis that was covered 24-7 by the international media. Since then, we've been embroiled in a... | 4/11/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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240 |
CleanAugust Berkshire - Minnesota Atheist | Host: Robert Price One of the outstanding leaders of organized atheism in our day is a man named August Berkshire. He is a non-believer of broad sympathies, having served as an officer and/or board member of organizations as diverse as Minnesota... | 4/4/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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241 |
CleanLawrence Krauss - Quantum Man | Host: Chris Mooney Physicist Lawrence Krauss has written numerous popular books about science, including the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek. But now he's tried something different—penning a scientific biography of the famed Nobel Prize... | 3/28/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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242 |
CleanCheryl Russell - Society, Statistics and Skepticism | Host: Karen Stollznow My guest this week is Cheryl Russell, a recognized authority on statistics and demographics. Cheryl is the editorial director of New Strategist Publications and the former editor-in-chief of American Demographics magazine. She is... | 3/21/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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243 |
CleanSpirituality: Friend or Foe? - Adam Frank and Tom Flynn | Host: Chris Mooney Recently, it has come to light that many scientists—scientists who don't believe in God--nevertheless claim to be "spiritual but not religious." Some in the secular movement have responded favorably to this new trend-one... | 3/14/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFrank Zindler - The Christ Myth | Host: Robert Price One of the most effective (not to mention hilarious) speakers for atheism and secular humanism today is Frank Zindler, author, linguist, translator, Bible scholar, and scientist—truly a Renaissance Man. He is an advocate as... | 3/7/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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245 |
CleanNeil deGrasse Tyson - Communicating Science | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week needs little introduction—he may be our most famous public communicator of science. He's Neil DeGrasse Tyson, renowned American astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of... | 2/28/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMichael Cicchini - Myths, Misconceptions, and the Law | Host: Karen Stollznow Michael Cicchini is a criminal defense attorney and a skeptic. Through extensive research and writing in the field of criminal law he has advocated for defendants' rights. Super Lawyers and Milwaukee Magazine have named him among... | 2/21/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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247 |
CleanDan Kahan - The American Culture War of Fact | Host: Chris Mooney Why do Americans claim to love science, but then selectively reject its findings when they're inconvenient? And why do some cultural groups reject certain types of scientific findings (about, say, harm to the environment), whereas... | 2/14/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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248 |
CleanDon Webb - Devil's Advocate | Host: Robert Price The nineties witnessed an outbreak of "Satanic Panic," with psychologists dredging up false memories of "Satanic ritual abuse" which landed innocent parents in jail and banked the fires of hysteria. It seemed the Salem Witch Trials... | 2/7/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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249 |
CleanArt Caplan - Bioethics Comes of Age | Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Arthur Caplan, sometimes called the country's "most quoted bioethicist" and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. In this wide ranging episode, Caplan discusses not only the... | 1/31/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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250 |
CleanJoe Nickell - The Other Side | Host: Karen Stollznow Joe Nickell is one of the world's most prominent skeptical investigators of the paranormal. He has researched numerous historical, paranormal, and forensic mysteries, myths and hoaxes, including hauntings, crop circles, UFOs,... | 1/21/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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251 |
CleanThe Irrationality Vaccine - Seth Mnookin | Host: Chris Mooney Recently the British Medical Journal dealt yet another blow to 1998 scientific study that first terrified the public about the possibility that vaccines might cause autism. The paper, the Journal alleged, was nothing less than... | 1/14/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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252 |
CleanHector Avalos - The End of Biblical Studies | Host: Robert Price Robert Price interviews fellow Bible Geek and secular Bible scholar Hector Avalos on a wide range of topics, from the increasingly devotional character of the Society of Biblical Literature to law enforcement in the Bible... | 1/7/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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253 |
CleanBarry Kosmin - One Nation, Losing God | Host: Chris Mooney By now you've probably heard the finding-the United States is growing less godly. More precisely, more and more Americans in surveys report that they lack a religious identity. These are the so-called "nones," and they already... | 1/1/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanReed Esau - SkeptiCamp: The Unconference | Host: Karen Stollznow Reed Esau is a skeptical activist and one of the founders of SkeptiCamp. Also known as Open Events, these are informal, community-organized conference where speakers tackle issues regarding science and skepticism. SkeptiCamp... | 12/25/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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255 |
CleanWhy Facts Fail - Brendan Nyhan | Ever been in an argument with someone and felt massively frustrated, because nothing you can say seems to change the person's mind? Maybe that's what you should expect to happen. Maybe you should get used to it. According to University of Michigan... | 12/17/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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256 |
CleanRoger Nygard - The Nature of Existence | Host: Robert Price Roger Nygard recently produced and directed a feature documentary called The Nature of Existence. In it, he asks some of the biggest of questions to "the widest cross-section of humanity possible." Why do we exist? What is our... | 12/10/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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257 |
CleanThe Future of Atheism: Beyond the Question of God | Host: Chris Mooney Recently at Pomona College in California, three atheists—one of them a Point of Inquiry host—got together to debate the future of the movement. And some sparks flew. Topics raised included the rise of the so-called... | 12/3/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJames Randi and D.J. Grothe - Amaz!ng Skepticism | Host: Karen Stollznow This week is a special episode featuring interviews with two guests, James Randi and D.J. Grothe. James Randi is a world-renowned magician and the modern-day Houdini of skepticism. He is the author of numerous books, including... | 11/27/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJohn Abraham and Scott Mandia - Climate Science Strikes Back | Host: Chris Mooney For the community of scientists who study the Earth’s climate, these are bewildering times. They've seen wave upon wave of political attacks. They're getting accustomed to a public that grows more skeptical of their... | 11/19/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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260 |
CleanRonald A. Lindsay - Observations on Ethics, Law, and CFI | Host: Robert Price How did his studies at Catholic Georgetown University set CFI President and CEO Ronald A. Lindsay on the primrose path to atheism? Does he now count himself a lawyer or a philosopher, neither, or both? Point of Inquiry asks Ron... | 11/15/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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261 |
CleanMassimo Pigliucci - Nonsense on Stilts | Host: Chris Mooney It’s a longstanding debate in the philosophy of science: Is "demarcation" possible? Can we really draw firm lines between science and pseudoscience? Massimo Pigliucci thinks so. In his new book Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell... | 11/5/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanWarren Bonett - Down Under Reason | Host: Karen Stollznow Warren Bonett is a skeptic, author and an independent bookseller. Warren wanted to become actively involved in critical thinking without joining an organization or becoming an –ism, so he opened "Embiggen Books". This is a... | 10/29/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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263 |
CleanCarl Zimmer - This is Your Brain on iPad | Host: Chris Mooney On the show this week, Point of Inquiry features one of our most distinguished science writers—Carl Zimmer. He's the author of many acclaimed books, including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and now he’s taken on an... | 10/22/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJohn Shook - The God Debates | Host: Robert Price Our guest is philosopher and author John Shook, discussing his experiences debating religious believers and whether such debates are a good idea. Some say no, that such spectacles merely serve believers by making it look like... | 10/16/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPZ Myers, Jennifer Michael Hecht, and Chris Mooney - New Atheism or Accommodation? | Recently at the 30th anniversary conference of the Council for Secular Humanism in Los Angeles, leading science blogger PZ Myers and Point of Inquiry host Chris Mooney appeared together on a panel to discuss the questions, "How should secular... | 10/10/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSteve Spangler - Hands-on Science | Host: Karen Stollznow Steve Spangler is a science educator, inventor, and an Emmy Award winning TV personality. He is the author of Fizz Factor: 50 Amazing Experiments With Soda Pop, Secret Science: 25 Science Experiments Your Teacher Doesn't Know... | 10/1/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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267 |
CleanJennifer Ouellette - Calculus, Las Vegas, and the Zombie Apocalypse | Host: Chris Mooney Ever wonder about the mathematical basis for battling a zombie infestation? Jennifer Ouellette has. In her new book The Calculus Diaries, the English major turned science journalist goes on an odyssey to relearn the branch of math... | 9/24/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJen Roth - Atheist Against Abortion | Host: Robert Price In this episode of Point of Inquiry, Robert Price interviews Jen Roth, co-founder of All Our Lives, a secular organization committed to advocating for women's right to exercise freedom of conscience in making voluntary, nonviolent,... | 9/17/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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269 |
CleanS. Jay Olshansky - Can Science Extend Human Life? | Host: Chris Mooney At a recent conference in Lake Tahoe, demographer S. Jay Olshansky presented a roomful of technologists with an exciting prospect. Through a concerted scientific attack on the problem of aging, he suggested, we might be able to... | 9/10/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrian Brushwood - Scams, Swindles and Skepticism | Host: Karen Stollznow Brian Brushwood began his career in magic "To get free drinks at bars and impress friends," but ended up becoming a science communicator and skeptic. The author of Cheats, Cons, Swindles & Tricks: 57 Ways to Scam a Free... | 9/3/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRichard Wrangham - Rediscovering Fire | This is a show about evolution—but not, for once, about the evolution wars. Instead, it concerns one of the most intriguing ideas to emerge in quite some time about the evolution of humans. In his much discussed book Catching Fire: How Cooking... | 8/27/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRobert M. Price - Is the Bible Mein Kampf? | Robert Price being off for the week, today we present a lecture given by Dr. Price at the Center for Inquiry's annual Student Leadership Conferece titled "Is the Bible Mein Kampf?" In his talk, Price suggests the Bible has much to offer even the... | 8/20/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAlexander Zaitchik - Glenn Beck’s War on Reason | This week, the scope of Point of Inquiry expands to include politics and more particularly, the fount of misinformation that is Glenn Beck of Fox News. This TV and radio personality is ushering in a new reign of ignorance in our national... | 8/13/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAndrew Mayne - Magic, Mischief and Mayhem | Andrew Mayne is a magician, paranormal illusionist, inventor, TV producer and skeptic. One of the most creative and innovative minds in magic, Andrew has written and produced over 40 books and DVDs. Both creator and consultant, he has worked with a... | 8/6/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFrancesca Grifo - Science Under Obama | When President Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009, he pledged to “restore science to its rightful place” in the U.S. government. And true to his word, the president promptly staffed his cabinet with distinguished scientific... | 7/30/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTom Quinn - O Sweet Jesus | Tom Quinn has spent the past 15 years as a documentary TV writer and producer for Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic and others. He has traveled the world producing programs that explore and deconstruct urban legends, psychic... | 7/23/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPhil Plait - Death from the Skies | Our guest this week needs no introduction for those in the skeptical and secular world. After all, he has a frakkin' asteroid named after him. He’s Phil Plait—science blogger extraordinaire for Discover Blogs, where he authors “Bad... | 7/16/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAdam Savage - Skeptic (Confirmed) | Adam Savage is an artist, actor, educator, special effects designer and co-host of the Discovery Channel's TV show Mythbusters. Adam has a diverse background in animation and design, and for almost two decades he has concentrated on the special... | 7/9/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRobert Price & Chris Mooney - Must Atheists Also Be Liberals? | Recently in Amherst, New York, two of Point of Inquiry’s hosts sat down for a special in-studio episode of the show. One was a conservative (Robert Price), one a liberal (Chris Mooney)—and both were atheists. The topic they tackled:... | 7/2/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTom Flynn - In Like Flynn | Tom Flynn is Executive Director of The Council for Secular Humanism, Editor of Free Inquiry magazine, Director of Inquiry Media Productions, and Director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum. A journalist, novelist, entertainer, and... | 6/25/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBill McKibben - Our Strange New Eaarth | Global warming, we're often told, is an issue we must address for the sake of our grandchildren. We need to cut carbon because of our moral obligation to future generations. But according to Bill McKibben, that's a 1980s view. As McKibben writes... | 6/18/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanTim Farley - What’s the Harm? | Tim Farley is a computer software engineer, skeptic, and creator of the popular website What’s the Harm? His site answers this salient question with over 670,000 stories of people who have indeed been harmed, damaged, injured, or even killed by... | 6/11/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanNaomi Oreskes - Merchants of Doubt | This week’s guest is Naomi Oreskes, co-author with historian Eric Conway of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Through extensive archival research, Oreskes... | 6/4/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanS.T. Joshi - Fright and Freethought | S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers, mostly in the realms of supernatural and fantasy fiction. He has edited corrected editions of the works of Lovecraft, several annotated... | 5/28/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMichael Specter - The Menace of Denialism | This week, we learned that J. Craig Venter has at long last created a synthetic organism—a simple life form constructed, for the first time, by man. Let the controversy begin—and if New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter is correct,... | 5/21/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanGeorge Hrab - Soundtrack to Skepticism | George Hrab is a composer, professional musician, singer, songwriter, podcaster, and skeptic. George is the Host and Producer of the Geologic Podcast, a popular weekly show about music, comedy, science, and skepticism. The drummer in the band... | 5/14/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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287 |
CleanElaine Howard Ecklund - How Religious Are Scientists? | It’s hard to think of an issue more contentious these days than the relationship between faith and science. If you have any doubt, just flip over to the science blogosphere: You’ll see the argument everywhere. In the scholarly... | 5/7/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLois Schadewald - The Schadewald Legacy: Nemesis of Pseudo-Science | Lois Schadewald's interest in both science and pseudoscience rubbed off on her from her brilliant brother Robert J. Schadewald, a prolific author and debater. When Bob died a decade ago he left behind a legacy of published essays and book chapters,... | 4/30/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDeborah Blum - Murder and Chemistry in Jazz Age New York | For many of us, chemistry is something we remember with groans from high school. Periodic Table of the Elements—what a pain to memorize, and what was the point, anyway? So how do you take a subject like chemistry and make it exciting, ... | 4/23/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBob Carroll - Defining Skepticism | Dr. Robert Todd Carroll is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and author of The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Sacramento City... | 4/16/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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291 |
CleanEli Kintisch - Is Planet-Hacking Inevitable? | For two decades now, we’ve failed to seriously address climate change. So the planet just keeps warming—and it could get very bad. Picture major droughts, calving of gigantic ice sheets, increasingly dramatic sea level rise, and much... | 4/9/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThomas J.J. Altizer - The Death of God | Thomas J.J. Altizer burst onto the religious scene in the 1960s with his book The Gospel of Christian Atheism. He was one of the "Death of God" theologians discussed in the famous TIME cover story, "Is God Dead?" Altzier holds an M.A. in theology... | 4/2/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanPaul Kurtz - John Dewey and the Real Point of Inquiry | Paul Kurtz is founder and chair emeritus of the Center for Inquiry and founder of a number of other organizations. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University... | 3/26/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanScott Lilienfeld - Real Self-Help | Dr. Scott Lilienfeld is Professor of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta. Scott is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a Consulting Editor for Skeptical Inquirer and the Founder and Editor of the CSI journal Scientific Review of... | 3/19/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanVictor Stenger - Taking a Stand for Science and Reason | Victor Stenger is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is also founder of Colorado Citizens for Science. He’s held visiting faculty positions at the... | 3/16/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAndrew Revkin - The Death of Science Writing, and the Future of Catastrophe | We live in a science centered age—a time of private spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid path-breaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. And we face science centered risks: climate and energy crises, biological and nuclear... | 3/12/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanRobert J. Miller - The Jesus Seminar | Robert J. Miller is Rosenberger Chair of Christian and Religious Studies at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. A Fellow of the Jesus Seminar since 1986, he was Scholar-in-Residence at Westar Institute in 2001. He is the of author numerous... | 3/5/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMichael Mann - Unprecedented Attacks on Climate Research | For the scientists who study global warming, now is the winter of their despair. In the news, it has been climate scandal after alleged climate scandal. First came “ClimateGate,” then “GlacierGate,”... | 2/26/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanVictor Stenger - The New Atheists | Victor Stenger is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is also founder of Colorado Citizens for Science. He's held visiting faculty positions at... | 2/24/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 299 Items |
Customer Reviews
A vital perspective.
It is beyond refreshing to have this podcast to listen to during my long drive to work as an alternative to the usual radio blabber. This show has the only truly "fair and balanced" perspective I know of and in an age where "Intelligent Design" is at the forefront of public discourse , Point of Inquiry is vital.
Essential Weekly Listening
You must listen to this podcast. Always has very good interviews of intriguing guests, even if I occasionally disagree with their points of view. The Ben Bradford's Media Myth Makers segment is always thought-provoking and Lauren Becker's commentaries are stirring, if also a little preachy (to atheists and seculars, no less!) I have become hooked on it, as has my boyfriend, and our whole circle of friends. It should be required weekly listening in high schools. Thank "God" for Center for Inquiry.
By far my favorite--worth buying the iPod for!
This is by far my favorite podcast. It has the best quality of discussion and interview about fascinating subjects all related to science, reason, religion, the supernatural, and the meaning of it all. I love the interviewer; the guests are not only insightful, but high profile individuals; the podcasts themselves are very dense, to the point, of high technical quality and downright engrossing. I listen to them on the bus, between classes, basically any chance I can. It's an addiction, but I won't apologize for it! It gets my mind working and I feel inspired and more grounded in my life and the world as a result of hearing this fresh perspective. That might sound crazy, but it's the truth. Let me just say that I liked my IPod before POI, but now I LOVE it! As for specifics (as of 5/2006), I recommend the two Sam Harris' interviews, as well as the two with Eugenie Scott, and the ones with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Brilliant!
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