It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the single person on earth most qualified to tackle those questions.  That’s what happened when, on a trip back to Austin from my sabbatical, I found a review copy of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress...

It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the single person on earth most qualified to tackle those questions.  That’s what happened when, on a trip back to Austin from my sabbatical, I found a review copy of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress...