The job of editors is to select writings which will help their readers make more sense of their world. If an editor is doing their job, a reader can pick a story with some confidence that it will do at least a reasonable job of telling them more or less helpful things fairly accurately (and engagingly). The editors of Slate have just demonstrated that they either cannot or will not do their job.

Someone who reads a story there now must ask themselves "Is this appearing here because the editors are incapable of recognizing that it's worthless? Is this appearing here because the editors want to make propaganda, to manipulate me into believing something, truth be damned? Is this appearing here because the editors owed someone a favor, or wanted to get into someone's pants, or wanted to acquire a reputation for being edgy and contrarian, truth be damned?"

Tony Blair avoided talking about his religious views while in office for fear of being labelled "a nutter", the former prime minister has revealed.

Truth to tell, it was a lot like sex (another mystery into which I was initiated that year, though not by Peter or Alex), and as soon as you'd done it once, you wanted to do it again and again and again. Disdaining the dining hall's white polystyrene cups, most of which had gone a little gray around the rim, each of us had procured our own china mug. Mine had a picture of a polka-dotted pig on it, an allusion to the frequency with which it was refilled. I stirred its contents with a silver demitasse spoon whose bowl was engraved with the name of my hometown. "Firenze" or "Cap d'Antibes" would have been preferable to "Los Angeles," but I did like the feel of the calligraphy against my tongue. Although the whole point of coffee-drinking was to be grown up - no Pepsi- Cola for bohemian intellectuals like us! - the amount of milk and sugar with which we undermined our sophisticated brew suggested that we needed to regress as much as we yearned to evolve. The end product resembled melted coffee ice cream.

“Asian religions worry less than Western religions that biotechnology is about ‘playing God,’” says Cynthia Fox, the author of “Cell of Cells,” a book about the global race among stem-cell researchers. “Therapeutic cloning in particular jibes well with the Buddhist and Hindu ideas of reincarnation.”

You can see this East-West divide in maps drawn up by Lee M. Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton. Dr. Silver, who analyzes clashes of spirituality and science in his book “Challenging Nature,” has been charting biotechnology policies around the world and trying to make spiritual sense of who’s afraid of what.