The website of John C. Snider
Quick! Name a working astronaut. Chances are, unless you’re a keen space program enthusiast, that you can’t. But there was a time—Cold War America in the 1960s—when most schoolchildren could readily rattle off the names of Alan Shephard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Shirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton: the Mercury Seven, the …
Francis Fukuyama was an optimist. In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, he put forth the proposition (if you’ll forgive my oversimplification) that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Western liberal democracy had finally gained a permanent foothold and there would, ultimately, be no returning to …
This is one of my favorite photos. It shows yours truly and the late social commentator, raconteur, and defender of atheism Christopher Hitchens at Emory University on February 26, 2010. I wish I could remember what I said that made him laugh—it must have been good. Allison and I had actually had brief encounters with …
Thoughts on the new book Smashing Statues by Erin L. Thompson On the night of January 20, 2022, workers in New York City removed an 82-year-old statue of Teddy Roosevelt from its location outside the American Museum of Natural History. The statue depicts the late president mounted heroically on a horse, with a pair of men (one …
A review of Benjamin Labatut’s award-nominated collection. They are well-worn clichés: the scientist as tortured genius; the idiot savant who peers unblinkingly into the secrets of the universe while forgetting to eat or bathe; or, at the most superficial, scientists as hopeless nerds, whip-smart but clueless when it comes to “regular” people and their quotidian …
You may be aware that 2018 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a book widely considered to be the first proper science fiction novel. I had not read it in many, many years, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit it. Here are my thoughts: The …
As you may have read, celebrated novelist John Updike has died at the age of 76. Honestly, I’ve never read any of his works, but while reading his obituary I was struck by his comments about science and faith: “I remember the times when I was wrestling with these issues that I would feel crushed. …
[Originally posted on March 19, 2008 at AmericanFreethought.com.] Walter Isaacson’s celebrated biography Einstein: His Life and Universe proves one thing: while Albert Einstein was not the greatest scientist who ever lived, he’s one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived. He wasn’t a scientist in the sense we might think, overseeing experiments and poring meticulously over data; rather, Einstein was a …
[Originally posted on March 10, 2008 at AmericanFreethought.com.] If there’s one point author Melody Moezzi drives home in her new book War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims, it’s that American Muslims have their work cut out for them these days. They are, to coin a phrase, caught between two worlds. The English name “Melody” …
Bishop John Shelby Spong’s controversial demolition and (hopeful) rehabilitation of Jesus of Nazareth. [Originally posted February 10, 2008 at AmericanFreethought.com.] Jesus was born in a perfectly natural way in Nazareth. His mother was not the icon of virgin purity. His earthly father, Joseph, was a literary creation. His family thought he [Jesus] was out of his …