Point of Inquiry

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Arie Kruglanski. He's a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland College Park, and has been a pioneer in the study of closed-mindedness-or, the "need for closure"—including how it drives fundamentalist belief systems and violent extremism. Dr. Kruglanski has served on National Academy of Sciences panels related to counterterrorism, and is a founding co-principal investigator at the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland. In addition, Kruglanski is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and has edited a variety of prominent journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Donald Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology. For more about his research, you can visit his website.

Host: Chris Mooney This week's guest is Joe Romm. You may know him as a top blogger on global warming and energy—but that's not why we're having him on. In an impressive show of versatility, Romm the scientist has written a book about how to persuade people. It's entitled Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga. In essence, it's a treatise on the neglected art of rhetoric, the technique mastered by Shakespeare and the writers of the King James Bible. In it, Romm delves deeply into figures of speech, and how they make orators persuasive by allowing them to activate people's emotions. Indeed, as Romm writes, modern neuroscience now confirms what the poets always knew about getting to people's heads through their hearts (that's a metaphor, by the way—one of the chief techniques that Romm discusses). If you ever want to understand why scientists—and people devoted to reason and critical thinking—fare so poorly getting their message across, you are going to want to listen to this show. Joe Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and oversees the blog ClimateProgress.org, which was named one of Time Magazine's Fifteen Favorite Websites for the Environment in 2007. He is also the author of several books, including Hell and High Water: Global Warming—The Solution and The Politics. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, and served as acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during 1997 and principal deputy assistant secretary from 1995 through 1998.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Peter Montgomery, senior fellow with People for the American Way and author of a new report entitled Twelve Rules for Mixing Religion and Politics, released last week with a new introduction by Bill Moyers. Point of Inquiry invited Montgomery on the show to discuss these very useful rules of the road, but also to ask a key question: Will the religious right ever consent to follow them? Peter Montgomery oversees the People For the American Way Foundation's research and writing on the Religious Right. Before joining the group in 1994, he was associate director of grassroots lobbying for Common Cause, and also wrote and edited for Common Cause Magazine, an award-winning journal featuring investigative reporting about the federal government.

Host: Indre Viskontas In an election year, it is especially important that our critical thinking skills be sharply honed. We have to sift through facts, fiction, and hyperbole in order to decide who it is that should lead us for the next four years. To remind us what the right questions to ask are and how to ask them, we invited on the show Dr. Christopher diCarlo, noted philosopher of science and ethics, whose research focuses on how and why humans reason, think, and act the way they do. diCarlo is a Philosopher of Science and Ethics whose interests in cognitive evolution have taken him into the natural and social sciences. He is interested in how and why the human brain has evolved to its current state and what cross-cultural and cross-species behavior can provide insight into universally common modes of reasoning. He is also interested in the application of neuroscience (specifically fMRI work), in an effort to better understand psychoneuroendocrine feedback looping in problem solving. His most recent book is How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Asking the Right Questions. In 2008, he was honored with the Canadian Humanist of the Year Award from the Humanist Association of Canada.

Kerry Emanuel is a leading atmospheric scientist and a self-described conservative. As a result, lately he's been at the forefront of trying to convince his ideological brethren that the science behind global warming is real. We invited Emanuel on to talk about whether global warming is indeed influencing the extreme weather that is afflicting the United States—and also for the unique vantage point that he brings to environmental and energy issues. Kerry Emanuel is professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an expert on global warming and on tropical cyclones—aka, hurricanes. In addition to his large volume of scientific papers, he is also author of two popular books: Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, and What We Know About Climate Change.

Host: Chris Mooney Can people who care about secularism take America back from the religious right? Of all the questions that concern us on this show, this is perhaps the most important, the most central, of all. And David Niose has an answer to it. Simply put, he thinks we can. In his new book, Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans, Niose outlines the damage the religious right has done, and how the growing forces of secularity stand poised to finally effectively counter them. Central to the strategy? Embracing the atheist, or at any rate, the secular identity, and wearing it proudly on one's sleeve. David Niose is an attorney and president of the Washington-based American Humanist Association. He has appeared widely in national and international media advocating for secularism and humanism, and serves as vice president of the Secular Coalition for America.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest is Tina Dupuy—the reporter, comedian, skeptic, and editor-in-chief of the startup publication SoapBlox. Dupuy appears frequently on MSNBC, Current TV, RT and the BBC and on numerous radio shows. She has written for Mother Jones, the Atlantic, Skeptic, and many other publications. Her weekly oped is syndicated nationally by Cagle Cartoons.

Host: Chris Mooney For this episode of Point of Inquiry, we tried something a little different. At Center for Inquiry headquarters in Amherst, NY, we filmed a special hour long program with multiple in-studio guests, including the famed atheist comedian Jamie Kilstein. As usual, the program is also available as an audio-only podcast. In either format, here's what it contains: When Doubt is a Crime: Michael De Dora, director of the Center for Inquiry Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C., discusses the disturbing case of an Indonesian man who was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison, just for questioning whether God exists. Fox News Bashing, Redux: Chris Mooney responds to recent listener comments, some of them complimentary, some... not so much. From the Culture Wars to... Chuck Norris: We talk with Ed Brayton, the blogger behind Dispatches from the Culture Wars and owner of the FreethoughtBlogs network, about recent church state issues—and his steady monitoring of everyone's favorite right wing karate menace. Gotta Keep ‘em Separated: We interview Jessica Ahlquist, the high school freethought activist who was recently victorious in her Rhode Island church-state lawsuit over a prayer banner displayed in her high school auditorium. Jamie Kilstein: The hilarious atheist comedian and host of Citizen Radio discusses how he became an atheist, the future of the 99 percent, mixed martial arts, and his fighting challenge to conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg.

Host: Indre Viskontas The idea that science moves forward by carefully peeling back layers of the onion of truth, one by one, in a deliberate fashion, is so prevalent that it borders on cliche. But the truth is that running scientific experiments often feels more akin to dipping a cup into a bottomless well of information: each new study simply raises more questions than it answers. Although scientific knowledge is vast, ignorance, or what's left to learn, dwarfs what we think we know. Exploring this boundless frontier, neurobiologist Stuart Firestein explains how ignorance, rather than facts, drives science. Stuart Firestein is the Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences where he studies the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience Firestein serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program for the Public Understanding of Science. His popular course at Columbia University served as the basis of his new book Ignorance: How it Drives Science published by Oxford University Press.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes and editor at large of The Nation. Hayes has come out with a much anticipated new book that makes a surprising argument. It's called Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, and in it, he attributes the stunning loss of trust in American institutions to, well, the system by which we chose who runs them. That system is a meritocracy—and it's supposed to be a fair one in which people get ahead or fall behind based on their own inherent abilities. But in reality, Hayes says, inequality in, inequality out. It's an intriguing and unexpected thesis, and after reading it, we wanted to ask Hayes about what this means for science in particular—which is, after all, a meritocracy. We also wanted to ask Hayes why people at the top of the totem pole—supposedly so smart, supposedly so well-trained and cultured—are in fact so poor at reasoning about those below them.