Feminine Faces of Freethought

If you'll be in the Dallas area, please consider attending Feminine Faces of Freethought, a conference being held on September 15, under the auspices of the Dallas Fellowship of Freethought.  More info here.  The program (as it stands so far) reads--



Women
of Reason--Dallas presents Feminine Faces of Freethought, a conference
featuring women speaking about topics that affect the freethought

Pink Boys, Blue Girls

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine had an interesting article by Ruth Pradawer about boys who like to dress like girls ("pink boys" is the phrase the author uses).  Parents get much more concerned about these boys than about girls who want to dress like boys.  Why is that?  One reason is because their futures are less conventional. The author writes--


The studies on what happens in adulthood

Short Story, Manque

Too bad I'm not a short story writer. I think I recently encountered material for a good story.  Alas, all I can do is relate this as an anecdote. 

I went to see The Dirty Projectors last weekend with my husband and 15-year-old daughter.  They were performing at the Kessler Theater in Oak Cliff, which is a very small, consummately cool venue, where it's hard to blend into the crowd. My

Why Philosophy Helps

Massimo Pigliucci has written a fine post today about irrationality and bad behavior in the so-called "community of reason."  Having regularly followed atheist blogs for about 5 years now, this strikes a deep chord with me. I'm much less familiar with "real world" skeptic/atheist groups than Massimo is (I imagine they're much better), but I am continually amazed by the online shenanigans. Massimo

The Creation Evidence Museum

Here in Texas, creationists lurk everywhere, so it seems reasonable to try to understand how they think. A place called the "Creation Evidence Museum" is an hour and a half from Dallas, right near Dinosaur Valley State Park.  At the park you can see dinosaur track fossils in a the bed of a shallow stream --very cool.  A man by the name of Carl Baugh created the museum close by in 1994, presumably

First Contact (2)

So (I was asking, here)--when do we make first contact with our children? Did they exist way back when they were developing in the womb, or do they come into existence only once they are conscious selves or full persons? I'm not quite at the "full conviction" stage yet, but I'm finding Eric Olson very persuasive. His book The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology is a thing of

Complaining about Sexism

Greta Christina says complaining about sexism and other forms of oppression is a Catch-22: if we don't complain, the problem remains invisible, but if we do complain, we

... get accused of “playing the victim card.” We get accused of making
up the marginalization, or exaggerating it, or going out of our way to
look for it, or twisting innocent events to frame them in this narrative
of