Richard Widmark has passed away at age 93. One of his best performances, in my opinion, was as the creepy Doctor Emmet Taulbee in the under-rated adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s The Moonshine War (1970), which also starred Alan Alda in an excellent offbeat role before he got stuck in Hawkeye mode.

Maverick P has a look at more of the “deep thoughts” of Sam Harris. In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes: If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.… Continue reading

Former Boston Globe columnist David Wilson has passed away. My father worked with him during the 1980s (they were both regulars on the op-ed page). In fact, as I recall it, he also worked at the Herald under Hal Clancy, and took the offer from the Globe on my dad’s advice (I think they both… Continue reading

The Framing Debate: Steve Matheson on what’s been overlooked: I maintain that if we have an “outspoken atheists” problem, the way to solve it is not to silence the voices with which we disagree, but to engage them, debate them, even refute them. Here are some thoughts on how to do that. 1. Put Myers… Continue reading

Tom Stoppard remembers the summer of 1968. This indeed was one of the things I loved about England. The English version of continental eruptions suggested a national character in control of itself. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, political activism at its extremes included murder, kidnap and bombs. My Italian publisher, one of the most… Continue reading