Our Strange Academics and Intellectuals

I hesitate to recommend this, because it's surprisingly disappointing, yet it might well be something people should look at, in case they're curious about the strange worlds and minds of contemporary academics. It's a Slate feature, whose premise is a rather irritating man interviewing a large number and variety of influential academics on various topics, all with distinctly religious under/overtones. Among the guests are our beloved (ahem) Dan Dennett, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, and lots of others I'm not so familiar with. Apart from the interviewer going on at greater length than seems to me polite, never mind interesting, the attempts of some of our supposedly greatest academics to talk about these really exciting and interesting issues are often disappointingly dull. I'm sure there are some gems in there however, so perhaps people could comment if they have the patience to search and manage to discover something amusing. The following link is to Dan Dennett discussing death and the afterlife. Notice his rather poor initial effort not to 'disparage' the comforting illusion of an afterlife!