The Lahore High Court has overturned a 2022 conviction of a university professor accused of blasphemous statements in a lecture, citing insufficient evidence and procedural irregularities in the original trial.
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Pakistan High Court Acquits Professor Held Four Years on Blasphemy Charge -
Missouri Lawmakers Tie Library Funding to Book-Removal Compliance A bill moving through the Missouri legislature would condition state library aid on demonstrated removal of titles challenged under a statewide 'objectionable content' registry.
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Review: 'The Better Angels, Revisited' by Rachel Kessler A decade on from Pinker's optimistic argument about declining violence, Rachel Kessler's rejoinder is careful, data-dense, and refuses to flatten its disagreements into a headline.
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The Vocabulary of Unbelief: How Freethinkers Named Their Own Tradition From atheism to secular humanism, the terms we use to describe non-belief carry centuries of argument, persecution, and hard-won clarity. Understanding the vocabulary is the first step to understanding the movement.
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Finnish Supreme Administrative Court Strikes Down Opt-Out-Only Religious Education Policy Finland's highest administrative court ruled Tuesday that its current model, in which religious instruction is the default and secular ethics an opt-out, unconstitutionally burdens families that decline religious education.
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Texas District Approves Unlicensed Chaplains as In-School Counselors A North Texas school board voted Tuesday to allow volunteer chaplains, without state counseling credentials, to serve students during the school day — the first district in the state to do so since enabling legislation passed in 2023.
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Review: 'Radicals' Finds the Freethought Tradition's Most Uncomfortable Ancestors Claire Havemann's three-part documentary on the nineteenth-century freethought movement is unusually serious about its subjects — and willing to let them contradict each other.
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Federal Regulators Quietly Shelved Three Major Investigations Last Quarter Documents obtained through FOIA requests reveal that enforcement actions against major financial institutions were dropped without explanation in the final weeks of the fiscal year.
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On Your Coverage of Regulatory Capture A reader with thirty years in federal regulatory work responds to our field guide.
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The Newspaper Didn't Die. It Was Sold for Parts. The collapse of local journalism is not a market failure. It is the predictable outcome of private equity treating public institutions as inventory.
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What the Replication Crisis Actually Tells Us About How Science Works The failure of a large number of published findings to replicate is not a scandal. It is science functioning as designed — just more visibly than usual.
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City's Affordable Housing Fund Diverted to Consultant Contracts, Records Show An eighteen-month review of municipal spending records reveals that nearly a third of the city's affordable housing allocation went to consulting firms, not housing.
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The First Gilded Age Ended. Here Is What It Took. The concentration of wealth and power in the late nineteenth century looked permanent until it didn't. The mechanisms of change are worth studying carefully.
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How Regulatory Capture Actually Works: A Field Guide The textbook definition of regulatory capture is too clean. Here is how the process actually unfolds, in practice, across industries and decades.
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On Epistemic Humility and the Academy A philosopher takes issue — respectfully — with our characterization of performed uncertainty.
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On the Moral Cowardice of Epistemic Humility There is a difference between genuine uncertainty and the performance of uncertainty as a way of avoiding difficult conclusions. Our public discourse has become expert at the latter.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About 'Difficult' Books The literary establishment's comfort with calling certain books difficult says more about the establishment than the books.
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The Attention Economy's Bargain, and Who Is Paying for It A close look at what the business model of free digital services actually extracts, from whom, and what the downstream consequences have been.
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The Infrastructure Nobody Talks About: How the Internet Actually Stays On Beneath the platforms and apps that dominate public discussion sits a layer of physical and institutional infrastructure that is aging, concentrated, and poorly understood.
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Cinema's Nostalgia Problem Is a Thinking Problem The film industry's retreat into franchises and reboots is not primarily an aesthetic failure. It is an epistemological one.
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The Pentagon Papers at Fifty-Plus: What We Actually Learned The publication of the Pentagon Papers is remembered as a triumph of press freedom. The deeper lesson — about institutional deception and its durability — is less often drawn.