• Creationists lose a lawsuit seeking to keep evolution out of public schools on the spurious grounds that it’s “religious”. It’s worth noting that they’ve given up on demanding equal time for their own beliefs and are now just seeking to destroy science education.
• This painfully appropriate headline says it all: Actual War on Black People Distracting from Fictional War on Christmas“. And along the same lines, don’t miss the magnificently righteous anger of my Patheos colleague James Croft.
• The Secular Student Alliance is hiring! The new position is for a communications contractor to focus on social-justice outreach and engaging secular students who happen to be women or minorities.
• NASA’s next-generation Orion spacecraft splashes down from a successful test flight. I have to admit I was a little disappointed at first when I found out this wasn’t a test of the spaceship design that propels itself with nuclear explosions.
• A previously unpublished novel by Ayn Rand, Ideal, will appear in 2015. Well, I guess I know what I’m doing when I finish with Atlas Shrugged.
• What causes should we care about as freethinkers? Ophelia Benson writes that “It’s not wise or helpful to try to adjudicate the degrees of importance or triviality of other peopleโs problems”.
• A New York court rules against a bid to grant legal personhood to chimpanzees. The intentions behind it were good, but this was the right call, in my opinion.
• Why most people are bad at choosing charities, and some suggestions on how to give more wisely. The majority of charitable donations to the “three C’s” (church, colleges, cancer) is wasted or ineffective.
• Some insightful thoughts on “politics that feel good“, and the inherent advantage that libertarianism and conservatism have over progressivism when it comes to offering ease and comfort to their advocates.