Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.

I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

[Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies.

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.