Hugo Schmidt

Spring 2011 -- On the 16th of October, 2010, I tramped into London along with two thousand other minds to attend The Amazing Meeting, the major conference of the skeptic movement.

March 2007 -- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion  (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 416 pp. $27.00.

Like any story relying on the fantastic, the superhero film has a test: does the fantastic sharpen and enhance the theme and the conflicts, or is it an escape from rational reality? Is this about a man who can control fire, or about how he chooses to control fire? So many superhero films are boring because they’re nothing more than escapism, with human characters as puppets of the elemental forces they’re supposed to be commanding.

TNI Spring 2010 -- I’m never impressed by those studies that come out every so often showing that some large percentage of the American citizenry “does not believe in evolution.” Such polls are mostly meaningless, and have little value beyond fuelling a certain kind of cheap snobbery.