Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and prolific author, has often been described as a cheerleader for science, reason, and humanism. He is often maligned by his critics as a defender of the ...

United Nations-- The headlines from around the world are gloomy; millions are starving, children dying in war zones, pandemics, trade wars and terror attacks. But ...

L ast month, Steven Pinker published Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. The book represents yet another milestone in the author’s slide from world-renowned linguist and ...

In his last outing, How the Mind Works, the author of the well-received The Language Instinct made a case for evolutionary psychology—or the view that human beings have a hard-wired nature that ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Talk may be cheap, and actions may speak louder than words. Nevertheless, rhetoric matters. It arouses passions, noble and base.

On Oct. 13, 1660, Samuel Pepys, arguably one of the more refined men of his day, wrote in his diary: "Out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered." This meant the ...

‘Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe,” the comedian George Carlin once observed, “and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have ...

When The Chronicle's book editor sent me Steven Pinker's new book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," to review, he wrote on a note, "I hope he's right!" referring to the subtitle about the decline of ...