Chris Mooney

Tucson Festival of Books, 2012

The Republican Brain is just about a year old now–but sales and interest are not flagging. It’s my most reviewed book on Amazon by far, and that’s not just because of all the 1 star reviews from right wingers who haven’t read it!

This coming weekend, I’ll be giving a multitude of talks about the book in Arizona–first, at the magnificent Tucson Festival of Books, and then outside it. So here is a list of events: (more…)

Obama: Alan Freed / Shutterstock.com, dinosaur: DM7/Flickr

Following on the last post, I can now share my written Mother Jones rebuttal to Michael Shermer on the left, the right, and science.

Shermer penned a piece on the “Liberal War on Science” in Scientific American–I explain why he’s way off. This, in particular, is noteworthy:

“Shermer’s article ends with a statement that, as far as I can tell, is just incorrect: ‘Surveys show that moderate liberals and conservatives embrace science roughly equally,’ he writes. I’m not sure where he gets this, but for a direct rebuttal let me point you to a recent study in the American Sociological Review by Gordon Gauchat, which finds that unlike liberals or moderates, conservatives have lost trust in science rather precipitously over the past several decades.”

You can read the full item here.

A few nights back I was on the Agenda With Steve Paikin, alongside Michael Shermer and Mark Lynas, discussing the “anti-science left.”

My view is that while there are anti-science views on the left wing, they’re swamped by what’s on the right, and that’s really the nature of things–liberals and scientists are allies (and conservatives and scientists are opposed) due to their psychology.

So I didn’t agree with the centrist, pox-on-both-houses framing of the show (and the opinion of Michael Shermer, who argues this). Still, it was a good, meaty discussion:

Deck of the USS Nimitz, image credit Julia Whitty

Yesterday, I hosted the latest Climate Desk Live event in DC. The video is here, and a Mother Jones wrap-up piece is here.

The bottom line: I had a retired admiral and a captain of the Navy explaining why climate and energy, respectively, are a seriously big deal to the military. And then I had the former administrator of NOAA reporting on work he’s done for the CIA recently, about how climate extremes could upend unstable regions of the world, like the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.

So, I think concern about climate and energy is finding a very new audience–of very serious, pragmatic, get-it-done people. And I couldn’t be happier about that.

Video here, article here. Article that originally inspired it all, by Mother Jones’ environmental correspondent Julia Whitty, here.

On Sunday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston, Indre & I recorded the latest Point of Inquiry live with a stellar guest–Steven Pinker–whose work couldn’t be more timely, because it focuses on the root causes of violence and shows that actually, violence across our global society has been in decline. There is both audio and also video:

At the end of the show there’s an interview with Tom Di Liberto, a NOAA meteorologist who two days earlier had won the America’s Science Idol competition at the meeting–a competition for which I served as emcee. Videos of this will be coming soon–for now, here’s an interview with the winner.

For the latest Point of Inquiry podcast, my guest is also one of my heroes, a man whose books I read as a kid: sci-fi novelist David Brin.

The interview ranged over a broad area–from Brin’s latest writings, to the future of the Internet and the interstellar quest for other intelligent civilizations.

The title of this post quotes one of the many gems of wisdom and insight from the interview.

Some others that I tweeted or will tweet:

The left-right axis is the “most lobotomizing metaphor in human history”: @DavidBrin1 on @pointofinquiry www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

Kicking the Hobbit: @DavidBrin1 critiques the romantic impulse in sci-fi/fantasy on the latest @pointofinquiry www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

“I’d much rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy” @DavidBrin1 on @pointofinquiry www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

Too often, the “furniture of fantasy” stories is anti-democratic, anti-science @DavidBrin1 on @pointofinquiry www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

How to change the Internet to ensure that bad ideas actually die! @DavidBrin1 on @pointofinquiry www.pointofinquiry.org/david_brin_uplifting_existence/

Check the show out here!