Skeptic Society Magazine

The French Riots Are a Mirror Into the Country’s Future

This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family. Between mid-September and its recent apex on October 17th, tens of thousands of high school students—joined by far-left activists from presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) party, radical black blocs, and young people from the...

The Greek Island That Taught Me the Art of Living

Lefkés, a mountain village on the Greek island of Paros, is named after white poplars that once surrounded it. Beyond a cluster of houses, a Byzantine footpath meanders toward the Aegean. According to village lore, the path is not visible from Paros’s shoreline to protect Lefkés from pirates. In the late 1960s, my Uncle Stelios bought a dilapidated house in Lefkés and, with my...

An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott

In November 1881 the children’s magazine St. Nicholas opened its new volume with a story by the most famous writer for girls in America. Its first words looked backwards: sixty years backwards, to a farmhouse in the New Hampshire hills where deer still roamed the woods and nobody had heard of a railroad. An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott was already a period...

Vaquera’s Converse VX-1 Heel Is Part Skate Shoe, All Baddie

Never lose your whimsy, Vaquera. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get great Converse collabs like these quirky little sneaker-heels. Yes, the New York label has remixed an archival Converse skate shoe into a sporty-chic kitten heel, and renamed it the VX-1. Basically, Vaquera turned a skate shoe into a vixen. It strikes the perfect balance between baddie and performance. We got the trendy kitten heel, yes....

6 ways bats are surprisingly human

Bat Week officially begins today. It’s the one week where Earth’s only winged mammals get top billing. Often associated with disease, vampires, and other generally unpleasant things, bats are actually important pollinators and play critical roles in our ecosystem. “They’re just so cool and so interesting. During first forays into bat studies, it was just one question after another,” Rachel Page, an evolutionary biologist...