By Emily Bobrow 10/16/06 12:00am

A Pair of Atheists Agree: Time to Let Go of God

Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95.

With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—­are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into the world of evolutionary biology. A rakish lecturer on zoology at Oxford, Read More

By Lizzy Ratner 9/11/06 12:00am

Not a Job for NyQuil: Incurable Fatal Insomnia

Bounteous nature has cooked up countless unpleasant ways for us to meet our maker, from the sudden horror of a ruptured aneurysm to the boxed-in terror of A.L.S. to the odoriferous humiliation of cholera. Death by Ebola virus has always seemed an unreasonably cruel way to go, and only a sadist could have come up Read More