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What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists? Not reason. Not evidence. No. But it can happen when people choose their polar opposite – religion.

people can begin to behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith. It has led some to regard people accused of the attempted murders of the Mohamed cartoonists as victims, and to demand "respect" for the Pope, when he should be in a police station being quizzed about his role in covering up and thereby enabling the rape of children.

One otherwise liberal newspaper ran an article saying that since the cartoonists had engaged in an "aggressive act" and shown "prejudice... against religion per se", so it stated menacingly that no doubt "someone else is out there waiting for an opportunity to strike again".

N.Y.U. professor Clay Shirky—the author of “Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the coming of the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most self-confident

Shirky believes that we are on the crest of an ever-surging wave of democratized information: the Gutenberg printing press produced the Reformation, which produced the Scientific Revolution, which produced the Enlightenment, which produced the Internet, each move more liberating than the one before.

The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

how many adult women actually take the images in fashion magazines — artificial as they are, feats of makeup and lighting and camera angles, even without retouching — at face value? “Our readers are not idiots,” Christine Leiritz, editor of French Marie Claire, told the New York Times last year, “especially when they see those celebrities who are 50 and look 23.” Most of us who read fashion magazines don’t feel we’re confronting reality when we see a photograph of a grown woman with preteen thighs. (We certainly see enough countervailing tabloid shots to know exactly what celebrity thighs look like.) If such photos enrage us, and often they do, it’s not because they damage our self-esteem, nor — let’s be honest — because we’re constantly fretting, like some earnest psychologist or crusading politician, about the emotional repercussions for adolescent girls. Our interest in altered images is not purely moral; it’s also aesthetic. We believe that a picture should convey, “objectively,” without undue intervention, what the lens originally captured. But these days, come to a fashion, consumer, or celebrity magazine with this quaint puritanical notion in mind, and you’re bound to be disappointed: Many contemporary images are illustrations masquerading as photographs, cartoons composed with a computer rather than a pen.

The truth is that most retouched photos fail as aesthetic objects, not because they’re deceptive, but because they’re timid, feeble, and inhibited. Constrained by their origins as photographs, they stop short of embracing full stylization. They force themselves to walk a very fine line: romanticize without being preposterous, improve upon nature without grossly misrepresenting a famous physique with which viewers are familiar. When an apparently hipless Demi Moore graced the cover of W last year, readers blanched. Likewise when Gwyneth’s Paltrow’s head appeared oddly detached from her body on the May 2008 cover of Vogue, giving her an upsetting alien-from-outer-space vibe. What were the editors thinking? That we wouldn’t notice? And yet perversely, artificial as these images are, they’re actually not artificial enough. It would be better, perhaps, if art directors just went all the way, publishing, without apologies, pictures of incarnate Betty Boops or Jessica Rabbits. Too many magazine images nowadays are neither fish nor fowl, neither photographs of integrity nor illustrations of potency. They’re weird in-between creatures, annoying and unsettling.

Few things are more crooked in India than the discourse on free speech and its relation to violence. Rather than focusing on the basic framework governing speech, the debate quickly descends into the politics of double standards.

The first is, could Husain have gotten away with taking artistic liberties with Islam the way he did with Hindu icons? On this view free speech cases are not about free speech. They are the tests of two things. Does the state favour one community over the other in the way it interprets what is offensive and what is permissible?

Second, what exactly are the protocols that govern offensive art? Are these standards applied uniformly across different domains? And third, whether Husain’s acceptance of Qatari citizenship is exactly a ringing endorsement of the values of a liberal democracy? These political questions will continue to cloud the fundamental issue: can India as a society handle freedom of expression in a way that befits a liberal democracy?

In 1989, cartoonist Matt Groening told a reporter that his new television show, “The Simpsons,” would tackle the serious subjects in life.

The inquiry, by the Commerce Department’s inspector general, focused on e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 (NOAA is part of the Commerce Department). Some of the e-mails involved scientists from NOAA.

Climate change skeptics contended that the correspondence showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity.

In a report dated Feb. 18 and circulated by the Obama administration on Thursday, the inspector general said, “We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data.”

BECAUSE SCIENCE TELLS US “INCONVENIENT TRUTHS.” If the process of science were all a delusion based on our biases and preconceptions and wishes, it would not give us answers that we don’t like or agree with. Yet scientists often discover things that go against our belief systems, but they must put aside their favorite ideas and face this reality. When Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the earth (and us) are not in the center of the universe, the idea wasn’t accepted by the Church or the world in general—but it was true. Everyone except a handful of religious nuts and the uneducated now look at the sun “rising” and “setting” and accept the counterintuitive notion that it is the earth turning instead. When Darwin showed that life had evolved and that we are all closely related to other living things, not specially created, it offended many people (and still does)—but its truth was soon acknowledged by the entire scientific community and nearly all educated Westerners who weren’t religiously biased, even before Darwin died. As the web cartoon puts it: “Science: if you ain’t pissing people off, you ain’t doin’ it right”.