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The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science

With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!

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May 4 • 4:00 AM EDT • Health • livinglutheran.org

How Perimenopause Became America's New Health Scare

If you’re a woman who speaks English, it sometimes feels like you can’t spend time on the internet without being bombarded with all the ways in which your body or your mind could be just a little broken. A few years ago, Instagram was full of women talking about attention deficit disorder, and lo and behold: From 2020 to 2022, the percentage of women (between the ages of 23 and 49) newly diagnosed with it nearly doubled. Not long ago, premenstrual syndrome was all the rage, with the algorithm pushing videos that explained why it’s okay to fly off the handle once a month. These days, the word perimenopause is everywhere. Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines. “Perimenopause is having a millennial moment. Here are 7 ways to cope,” says The Washington Post. Or perhaps you’ve seen Apple TV’s glossy drama Your Friends & Neighbors, which is back for its second season; the female protagonist Mel is explicitly perimenopausal, and in the first season, she keyed a car for no apparent reason. She’s played by Amanda Peet, who talks about being perimenopausal in real life (“God knows I’ve wanted to key a lot of cars in the last three years,” she’s said.) In fact, it sometimes feels like every celebrity interview with a forty- or fiftysomething woman requires her to open up about what’s going on with her hormones. Drew Barrymore joked on CBS Mornings that when she found out how long perimenopause can last, she thought she’d “never make it 10 years like this.” Katherine Heigl told Business Insider that “whoever designed it so that women would be going through perimenopause while raising teenagers should be sent a strongly worded letter.” At the same time, influencers who talk about perimenopause seem to have cropped up out of nowhere with something to sell you, causing people online to wonder where this all came from. It’s trickled down from Instagram to tchotchke shops, which sell fridge magnets that say “Perimenopause Is Hot.” You can buy a T-shirt that proclaims “Perimenopause Made Me Do It!” My mom, who is 48, started uncontrollably shaking her leg at night a few years ago. “It’s perimenopause,” she told me when I complained about how annoying it was. But what exactly is perimenopause—and why are we all talking about it all of a sudden?

May 3 • 7:52 PM EDT • Health • thefp.com

The least respected hitter comes through for the John Curtis-Mount Carmel semifinal winner

Brynn Godfrey, whose father, Jerry, is the John Curtis softball coach, came to bat with the bases loaded in the 10th inning of a semifinal against Mount Carmel.

May 2 • 8:41 PM EDT • Sports • nola.com

Higgins misses out on final after thriller with Murphy

John Higgins says Shaun Murphy "hits it like God" after the Scot misses out on a ninth World Snooker Championship final following a tense 17-15 defeat at the Crucible.

May 2 • 7:58 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Palmetto Sports Shorts: The Cat Guy

WATCH: Palmetto Sports Director Carmine Gemei speaks with Clemson Coach Brad Brownell, senior forward RJ Godfrey about embracing the role of being a cat guy.

May 1 • 9:35 PM EDT • Sports • foxcarolina.com

"He Is Proof Of God On Earth": Mojtaba Khamenei's Aide Amid Health Concerns

Ayatollah Mohsen Qomi said that despite his injuries, Iranian officials were now focused on preserving the Supreme Leader's life.

May 1 • 2:57 AM EDT • Health • ndtv.com

What Trump’s post as a Jesus-like figure tells us about political messianism

Democracy cannot thrive, or even survive, when its leaders see themselves as godlike and divide citizens into believers and heretics, a scholar writes.

Apr 30 • 8:34 AM EDT • Politics • theconversation.com

Teamfight Tactics patch 17.2

Opening Encounters & new God Blessings make 17.2 a celestial encounter you won’t want to miss.

Apr 28 • 2:00 PM EDT • Technology • teamfighttactics.leagueoflegends.com

John Henry and the Red Sox just settled all family business

Well, there is really only way to describe this: Red Sox owner John Henry, like Michael Corleone in the final moments of “The Godfather,” just settled all family business in…

Apr 25 • 9:53 PM EDT • Business • 985thesportshub.com

Byron Donalds shows spiritual side in Southeastern University commencement speech

'This is what happens in the journey of life when you put God at the center.'

Apr 25 • 8:56 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com

Birdbrained Science: My God, it’s full of stars

I’ve been a casual stargazer ever since high school when I first watched a meteor shower with some of my friends. The stars often (and rightfully, in my opinion) get romanticized; countless people …

Apr 24 • 6:00 AM EDT • Science • dailycampus.com

Best of the Best: Duke’s Legacy in the Collegiate Women Sports Awards

DURHAM, N.C.-- Women's sports have never had a bigger stage. Audiences are growing, athletes are becoming household names and the conversation around female ...

Apr 24 • 4:00 AM EDT • Sports • goduke.com

Knicks lose, Mets blow 4-run lead and Jets make much-criticized NFL Draft selection in wild 4 minutes for New York sports

Apr 23 • 10:55 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Peter Molyneux's Latest Game Is A Broken Sandwich-Making Sim

Masters of Albion is out in Early Access, and it sure is a new game from the makers of Godus and Legacy

Apr 23 • 1:34 PM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

Toronto 'Godspell' Doc 'You Had To Be There' Acquired By Greenwich Ent.

The 1972 'Godspell' doc 'You Had To Be There,' about the show that launched Gilda Radner, Martin Short and more has been acquired by Greenwich Ent.

Apr 23 • 12:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • deadline.com

Masters of Albion does what Peter Molyneux promised, "it brings joy"

Masters of Albion is Fable creator Peter Molyneux's last game, and while it's launching in Steam early access, it's got serious sparkle.

Apr 22 • 2:00 PM EDT • Technology • pcgamesn.com

The Prince Philip Movement: The Yaohnanen Tribe Of Tanna Island Believed The Duke Of Edinburgh Was A God

According to followers of the movement, Prince Philip was a powerful mountain spirit who would one day return home.

Apr 22 • 5:33 AM EDT • Science • iflscience.com

Santiago Canyon’s Community Science Night makes education fun for younger students

Students and their families from throughout Orange County are invited to the Friday evening event.

Apr 20 • 12:02 PM EDT • Science • ocregister.com

Namita Thapar hits back at trolls abusing her, her mom over video on health benefits of Namaz: 'God's watching you all'

Namita Thapar defended making video on health benefits of Namaz and further slammed trolls for disrespecting her and her mother. | Web Series

Apr 20 • 2:02 AM EDT • Health • hindustantimes.com

Documentary highlights Esther Wojcicki's influence on tech

A new documentary explores the impact of Esther Wojcicki, celebrated Palo Alto educator and "Godmother of Silicon Valley."

Apr 19 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Farewell to Prof. Michael Rabin, godfather of Israeli computer science

A pioneer of modern computing, Rabin shaped algorithms, cryptography and AI foundations, mentored generations and remains the only Israeli to win the Turing Award, the field’s highest honor, as computer science reshaped everyday life

Apr 18 • 12:42 PM EDT • Science • ynetnews.com

Who Speaks for God? Darwinists Do, Apparently

Center for Science and Culture Senior Fellow Stephen Dilley explores this curious phenomenon in his talk at the 2025 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith.

Apr 18 • 10:59 AM EDT • Science • scienceandculture.com

Testing Begins for Katalyst-NASA Swift Boost Mission

On April 14, engineers from Katalyst Space Technologies arrived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to begin environmental tests of the company’s LINK robotic servicing spacecraft.

Apr 17 • 3:23 PM EDT • Science • science.nasa.gov

Pope Leo decries those who 'manipulate religion' for military, economic or political gain

Roman Catholic Pope Leo spoke out against people "who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain."

Apr 16 • 2:29 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Anitta, like you've never heard her before. The Brazilian superstar talks new album, 'SNL' and God

Anitta’s upcoming album “Equilibrium” showcases her roots with a vibrant mix of Brazilian funk, samba, bossa nova and more | WBEN

Apr 15 • 11:17 AM EDT • Entertainment • audacy.com

Holy Mother of God, JD Vance Really Thinks He Knows Better Than Pope Leo XIV

Hey, Mr. Vice President, try to learn your job before you presume to teach the pope his.

Apr 15 • 10:41 AM EDT • Politics • esquire.com

Letter: It's not politics, it's the Gospel

"Funny how (Sen.) Cramer thinks it's OK to twist Biblical passages to defend his political cruelty, but not for the Pope to speak out on the very thing all ministers of the Gospel are called to proclaim – advocacy for the least of these and the message of peace, love, grace and acceptance that’s the core of who God is and what preachers are ordained to preach," writes Rev. Paula V. Mehmel.

Apr 14 • 4:42 PM EDT • Politics • inforum.com

TFT patch 17.1

Choose your Space God, earn their powerful boon, and assemble your galactic roster!

Apr 14 • 2:00 PM EDT • Technology • teamfighttactics.leagueoflegends.com

Pope Leo’s resolute response to Trump attack reveals a man of God, not politics

Pope Leo XIV does not claim to direct political outcomes. He claims the right, and the duty, to judge them.

Apr 13 • 9:39 PM EDT • Politics • theconversation.com

'View' stars slam Donald Trump sharing image of himself as Jesus: 'Blasphemous'

'The View' star Sunny Hostin called for the use of the 25th amendment after Donald Trump shared image of himself as Jesus: 'God is not to be mocked,' added former Trump staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin.

Apr 13 • 12:29 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Alice Cooper returns to Eastern Iowa

The Godfather of Shock Rock performs April 18 at Alliant Energy PowerHouse in Cedar Rapids.

Apr 13 • 11:57 AM EDT • Entertainment • thegazette.com

Joe Gibbs shows family's importance in Victory Lane

Joe Gibbs stresses the importance of God and family before he's happily interrupted by his grandson, race winner Ty Gibbs, in Victory Lane.

Apr 12 • 8:00 AM EDT • Technology • nascar.com

The Screen Time Maximalists Who Spend an Ungodly Amount of Time on Their Phones

As debates over social media addiction rage, people with extreme screen times tell WIRED they have no plans to cut back.

Apr 12 • 6:30 AM EDT • Technology • wired.com

KAMIKURA: Weaponization of religion in U.S. politics

In the U.S. Constitution, written in 1787, the founders did not mention any god. In god's absence on paper, the founders reinforce the separation of church and state. The First Amendment, passed in 1789 and ratified in 1791 in the Bill of Rights, states that Congress may not do anything to legislatively restrict the free practice of religion. But in the current political climate, the state and church are becoming increasingly intertwined.

Apr 9 • 8:48 PM EDT • Politics • dailytargum.com

The Artemis II mission reveals glory of God

Discoveries in physics, astronomy and biology — from the Big Bang to DNA code — challenge science-based atheism and point to evidence of a cosmic plan.

Apr 7 • 4:23 PM EDT • Science • foxnews.com

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes

Pantheon Review by Walter Cummins The image of Alfred Tennyson I’ve carried for decades goes back to the childhood card game of Authors that depicts him with a stately continence sharpened by a jutting black beard. He’s formidable, his aura superior. Holmes opens his biography of the youthful Tennyson by describing the similar formality of the imposing Tennyson statue at Trinty College Cambridge, sharing the honor with other Trinity greats, including Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. Holmes doesn’t want to chip away at that statue but rather reveal its inner youthful core of the man—tall, handsome, and talented but unformed, emerging from a disturbed family of addicted or insane male siblings and four unusual sisters struggling under a violent alcoholic clergyman father. Alfred was certainly statuesque, but would he end up a block of unformed stone like his equally promising brothers? He was youngest of three equally regarded Tennyson brothers at Cambridge, all bright, handsome, and talented, in fact Alfred regarded by some as less promising than his elders who also wrote poetry. Yet Alfred wrote one of his major poems, “The Kraken,” at twenty, revealing both his talent, his interest in geological forces, and the haunting creature that embodied his anxieties. While Holmes focuses on Tennyson of the 1830s and 1840s, he can’t tell his story without exploring his involvement with the Victorian intellectual upheaval. Tennyson was fascinated by new scientific perspectives, following the latest findings as soon as books and articles were published. He was especially taken with Charles Lyell’s deep studies of geology and the discovery of fossils and a timeline of the planet’s development that did much to question fundamental religious assumptions. The impact of these discoveries is reflected in Tennyson’s poetry and led to the crisis in belief he shared with so many contemporaries. He was especially taken by the cycles of destruction and renewal that informed the struggles he confronted in In Memoriam, Maud, and Idylls of the King. Tennyson was only one of the eventual major figures at Cambridge at the same time, young men just beginning to realize their potential. Charles Darwin was at Christ College, although there is no evidence that he and Tennyson even met as students or later in life. Yet evolution became significant in Tennyson’s thinking and the issues of his poetry. One of Tennyson’s best and most important Cambridge friends was Edward FitzGerald, who became the translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and in their on and off relationship served as Tennyson’s harshest critic. FitzGerald was also a friend of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, the two of them partying in Paris as undergraduates. That connection led to a friendship between Thackeray and Tennyson. Others who came to play significant roles in Tennyson’s life were Thomas Carlyle, the Brownings, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Tennyson’s deepest friend at college was Arthur Hallam, who at twenty wrote a glowing review of Tennyson’s first poetry collection, travelled on European adventures with him, and fell in love with his sister Emily. Hallam was also regarded as one more very promising Cambridge student. His sudden death at twenty-two in Vienna from a stroke while travelling with his father devastated many friends, but perhaps Tennyson most of all. He did not write immediate poems of grief but took years to compile those collected in In Memoriam A.H.H., published in 1850, almost twenty years after Hallam’s death For all of Tennyson’s early poetic successes and successes, Holmes reveals him as an often troubled young man suffering periods of depression, fearing planetary upheaval, concerned about supporting himself, disappointed in romances, and worried that he would inherit the family’s mental illness tendencies. Yet despite his seeming withdrawals, he was always writing poetry that he kept private and would not let go, constantly revising. 1850 became a transformative year for Tennyson. He finally consented to publishing In Memoriam with a last-minute prologue that acknowledged God and perhaps convinced the religious Emily Sellwood to marry him after years of pursuit.. He opened up to Emily, revealing his struggles with fears of depression and “weird seizures.” The devastating event of that time was the stillborn death of his unnamed first son. It shook him, but Emily’s faith brought them closer and convinced him to believe in an afterlife. Two later sons survived. With the death of William Wordworth in April of 1950, Tennyson was named poet laureate at age forty-one, reluctantly accepting. It’s as if Tennyson’s life split in half in that year. He lived another forty years, now a recognized success, with the prestige of being an official poet writing patriotic verse, wealthy and revered, no longer the insecure young man seeking an outlet for his immense talent. He earned a place in the Authors deck, now dignified and in 1884 elevated to the peerage as Arthur, Lord Tennyson. Richard Holmes is the author of twenty previous books on the Romantics and Victorians, several of which received awards. The Boundless Deep was shortlisted for the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He captures the complex vicissitudes of Tennyson’s youth, illustrated by frequent excerpts from the poetry, placing that life in the full context of the shattering discoveries that led to an upheaval of thought in the Victorian age.

Apr 7 • 12:35 PM EDT • Science • calirb.com

‘Pray that we are on God’s side,’ Vance says of U.S. role in Iran war

When asked whether he shared Trump’s view that the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran carried divine backing, the vice president declined to go as far.

Apr 7 • 12:01 PM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Trump says God supports U.S. cause in Iran war as he threatens wider bombing

The president offered a new rationale for the costly, unpopular conflict: “God wants to see people taken care of,” he said.

Apr 6 • 7:14 PM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

The GoDaddy App Streamlines Business on the Go

Entrepreneurs can now bring their business with them everywhere they go using the reimagined GoDaddy app, a mobile-first experience designed to help owners create, manage and grow their businesses.

Apr 5 • 9:05 PM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Sen. Raphael Warnock’s Easter message: We have a shot at working with God to write ‘a new chapter for human possibility’

Apr 5 • 12:42 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Buried Roman sanctuary discovered beneath Frankfurt hints at shocking rituals

A hidden Roman sanctuary discovered beneath Frankfurt is offering rare clues about ancient rituals, including possible human sacrifice. With major funding secured, scientists are now racing to uncover how this mysterious, multi-god cult site operated.

Apr 4 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

I watched The Godfather again at 64 and cried — not because the movie changed, but because I finally understood that the films we watched in our twenties weren’t just entertainment, they were instruction manuals for masculinity, family, and honor that shaped every major decision I ever made

Last week, I found myself alone in my living room, remote in hand, scrolling through streaming options when The Godfather appeared on screen. It had been years since I’d watched it. Decades, really. Something made me click play, and three hours later, I was sitting there with tears streaming down my face. Not because Sonny […]

Apr 4 • 6:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • vegoutmag.com

Elder Patrick Kearon: ‘About His Business’

‘Our service is a choice, an offering to God and a blessing’

Apr 4 • 12:37 PM EDT • Business • thechurchnews.com

A Poet of Science Who Shook Faith in God

A Poet of Science Who Shook Faith in God: Eminent biographer Richard Holmes reveals how Tennyson predated Darwin and speaks to us today

Apr 3 • 2:00 PM EDT • Science • nautil.us

Jim Bob Duggar scolds son Joseph for ‘terrible decisions’ in jailhouse email: ‘Pray that God would have mercy on you’

'19 Kids and Counting' star Jim Bob Duggar had some advice for Joseph, his second son to be charged with a sexual crime related to children: "You have made some terrible decisions, but God has already forgiven you if you have asked him.'

Apr 3 • 12:48 AM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

War After War Turns Young Israelis to Religion

As conflict ravages the region, young people in Israel say “Only God” can protect them—a shift that will have dramatic consequences for the country’s culture and politics.

Mar 31 • 12:01 AM EDT • Politics • bloomberg.com

Yagody: transforming Ukrainian tradition with song

Ukrainian vocal group Yagody uses their unique blend of traditional folk and modern electronica to construct an emotionally resonant and powerful sonic landscape. The band will perform at CSPS Hall Thursday, April 2.

Mar 30 • 11:45 AM EDT • Entertainment • thegazette.com

Game #3: Pittsburgh Pirates vs. New York Mets

The Pirates are on the road looking to grab a win today.

Mar 29 • 12:40 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

In wrangling dark matter, some scientists find inspiration in religion

Father Adam Hincks, a Jesuit priest who teaches at the University of Toronto and serves as an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory, believes that for some, contemplating dark matter and dark energy could elevate their minds to God.

Mar 29 • 11:49 AM EDT • Science • cruxnow.com

Release Engineer Completes Data Science Online Courses

This spring a release engineer completed three Coursera Data Science courses from Johns Hopkins and the Software Carpentry instructor training, each roughly four weeks long. The courses covered The Data Scientist's Toolbox, R Programming, and Getting and Cleaning Data, and required substantial external reading to finish programming assignments. The training emphasized R, GitHub, reproducible research, and evidence-based teaching methods applicable to managing distributed systems.

Mar 28 • 9:01 PM EDT • Science • letsdatascience.com

19th-Century Blues: When Science Killed God and Made Some Englishmen Sad

With the Royal Navy ruling the waves, Queen Victoria safely on her throne, science explaining a confusing world, and British missionaries, explorers, and armies turning the map pink you’d think tha…

Mar 27 • 4:59 AM EDT • Science • lithub.com