Author: Katrina Voss

Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!, by Penn Jillette (New York: Blue Rider Press, the Penguin Group, 2012, ISBN 978-0-399-16156-8). pp. Hardcover, $25.95. Golden Compass author Philip Pullman has written that “after nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Had Penn Jillette authored this sentiment, one could be …

In 1996, a particularly devastating nail was driven into the coffin of “homosexuality is a choice” rhetoric. A team of researchers found that the more older brothers a boy has, the greater the likelihood that he will grow up to be gay. Since the research was first published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, many …

Sometimes evolution seems to bestow a sort of karmic recompense upon certain hard-working members of a species. Sometimes the individual who demonstrates the greatest Protestant work ethic will, in fact, reap the greatest reward. A male Australian redback spider who courts a female for fewer than one hundred minutes may get a chance to enjoy …

Television trivia websites provide a wealth of information about the industry’s envelope-pushing “firsts.” For example, television audiences witnessed the first lesbian kiss on L.A. Law in 1991, while the first interracial kiss appeared much earlier, on Star Trek in 1968. Trivia websites are less clear about which show first featured a couple sharing a bed: …

In the weeks leading up to May 21, 2011, billboards boasted that the end of the world as we know it—the “Rapture,” to be exact—was upon us. Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster and self-proclaimed eschatologist who previously had predicted judgment days on May 21, 1988, and September 7, 1994, had decreed the new 2011 …

A humanist friend of mine recently learned that his reputation had been unfairly tarnished many years ago when he was in medical school. Somehow, his name had become associated with a bizarre and infamous prank. The incident featured several of his male classmates, who, drunk on at least testosterone, sneaked into the morgue one night, …

Suppose you are a religious bully whose endgame is to stamp out a particular field of scientific inquiry and basically spoil everybody’s fun. Now suppose you’re not dealing with medieval peasantry but rather with a modern public at least superficially educated in science. Your plan would best be served by engaging in very “sciencey” talk …

I have been a vegetarian for almost as long as I have been an atheist. By age fourteen, I had made the conscious decision not to consume any animals, and I have not eaten meat since. For the most part, I have not made a habit of flaunting my decades-long vegetarianism or harassing others about …

A few years ago, after reading an essay in The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) by a respected Pennsylvania State University professor of meteorology,* I felt that itchy-finger sensation common to every writer when a hot retort is in order. At the time, I was a practicing broadcast meteorologist with modest BA and …

A year ago, I published an essay in Free Inquiry in which I affirmed that porn is generally a healthy art form (yes, art form) that hurts no one and possibly even benefits society by providing safe outlets for the otherwise-frustrated sexual energy of the populace.* A letter from a female reader accused me of …

The story goes like this: a woman wants a healthy, attractive baby, so she finds a man with the proper specifications and takes him home. The man, perhaps sensing his paramour’s ulterior motive, insists upon an alternative (read, oral) method of sexual congress in order to protect himself from undesired fatherhood. After the man completes …

Several months after Barack Obama’s inauguration as president of the United States, our giddy disbelief has yet to erode. And rightly so. This was an event we thought we might never see, some might say a milestone in our collective ethical trajectory. True, television might have given us the nudge we needed, a fortuitous wooing …

Three years ago, I wrote an essay for Free Inquiry titled “Thank You, Science” (February/March 2006). I thanked science for orthodontia that straightened my crooked teeth and for antibiotics, without which I would have died of pylenophritis at thirty-three. On behalf of womankind generally, I thanked science for reliable birth control. This scientific innovation has …

In February of 2006, I consented to have my cheek swabbed, my finger pricked, and my picture taken. The scientific study in which I was participating, “The Genetics of Human Pigmentation, Ancestry, and Facial Features,” was somewhat unusual in that each participant would later be provided with his or her own genetic ancestry results and …

A seasoned meteorologist once told me that predicting the weather is like depositing a drop of ink in a swimming pool and projecting the drop’s future movements, dispersions, and flow . . . while thousands of hyperactive kids play Marco Polo in the water. Weather forecasting is famously and necessarily inexact in a way that …

Some of us have enjoyed the luxury of an atheist upbringing. Unlike our brethren who “converted” to a nontheistic worldview as adolescents or adults, we never have to suffer the post-traumatic stress that comes from a religious childhood. There are no ghosts of dictatorial priests or despotic pastors that still make us squeamish about our …

Notwithstanding the online music video “Iraq: The Musical,” we may be a very long way from “Iraq On Ice.” A very long way, considering that even theatrical endeavors like movies with the theme “Iraq: You Were Right When You Said It Was a Bad Idea” do not seem to be working. An “I told you …

During a brief stint blogging about weather, climate, and meteorology, I had occasion to use the phrase “bipedal primate” to refer to those particular hairless hominids who by definition should have the requisite cranial stuffing to make sense of those words. In response, an angry patron wrote me a brief email, “Keep the religion of …

Several months ago, an associate professor of anthropology and genetics at the Pennsylvania State University proposed marriage to me via text message. I answered in the affirmative in the same medium. We then began making plans for a meaningful atheist ceremony in which passages from Dar­win’s Origin of Species and Robert Inger­soll’s poetry would be …

Several months ago, an associate professor of anthropology and genetics at the Pennsylvania State University proposed marriage to me via text message. I answered in the affirmative in the same medium. We then began making plans for a meaningful atheist ceremony in which passages from Darwin’s Origin of Species and Robert Ingersoll’s poetry would be …