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

I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.

Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy.

Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?