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But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.

We use "I" more when we talk to someone with power because we're more self-conscious. We are focused on ourselves — how we're coming across — and our language reflects that.

You can't, he believes, change who you are by changing your language; you can only change your language by changing who you are

Since the late 19th century in the United States, critical responses to the spectacle of pain in executions have continued to spur ardent calls for the improvement of killing technology. One of the most prolific legal theorists of capital punishment, Austin Sarat, has concisely referred to this history: “The movement from hanging to electrocution, from electrocution to the gas chamber, from gas to lethal injection, reads like someone’s version of the triumph of progress, with each new technique enthusiastically embraced as the latest and best way to kill without imposing pain.” Recent debates over the administration of midazolam and pentobarbital, and in what dosage, seamlessly integrate themselves into Sarat’s grim progress narrative. The inexhaustible impulse to seek out less painful killing technologies puts a series of questions in sharp relief: What is, and should be, the role of pain in retributive justice? And how has the law come to rationalize the condemned’s experience of pain during an execution? While the Eighth Amendment stipulates the necessity of avoiding “cruel and unusual punishment,” in 1890 the Supreme Court decided this clause could mean that no method of execution should impose “something more than the mere extinguishment of life.” And then, in 1958, the court also determined that the amendment should reflect the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” If we were to consider the “standard of decency” in our society today, we would be pushed to ask: By what moral order have we continued to establish the “extinguishment of life” as something “mere,” and the pain of the condemned as excessive? In other words, how has the pain experienced during an execution become considered cruel and unconstitutional but not the very act of killing itself? We should dial back to older histories of law to tap into pain’s perennially vexed role in retributive theories of justice.

One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief. But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief?

L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.

That’s not to say that I think everything is within the scope of human knowledge. Surely there are things not dreamt of in our philosophy, not to mention in our science – but that fact is not a reason to believe in supernatural beings. I think many arguments for the existence of a God depend on the insufficiencies of human cognition. I readily grant that we have cognitive limitations. But when we bump up against them, when we find we cannot explain something — like why the fundamental physical parameters happen to have the values that they have — the right conclusion to draw is that we just can’t explain the thing. That’s the proper place for agnosticism and humility. But getting back to your question: I’m puzzled why you are puzzled how rational people could disagree about the existence of God. Why not ask about disagreements among theists? Jews and Muslims disagree with Christians about the divinity of Jesus; Protestants disagree with Catholics about the virginity of Mary; Protestants disagree with Protestants about predestination, infant baptism and the inerrancy of the Bible. Hindus think there are many gods while Unitarians think there is at most one. Don’t all these disagreements demand explanation too? Must a Christian Scientist say that Episcopalians are just not thinking clearly? Are you going to ask a Catholic if she thinks there are no good reasons for believing in the angel Moroni?

Do some scientists hold on to a belief longer than they should? Or, more provocatively phrased, when does a scientific belief become an article of faith?

This kind of posture, when there is a persistent holding on to a belief that is continually contradicted by facts, can only be called faith. In the quantum case, it's faith in an ordered, rational nature, even if it reveals itself through random behavior. "God doesn't play dice," wrote Einstein to his colleague Max Born. His conviction led him and others to look for theories that could explain the quantum probabilities as manifestations of a deeper order. And they failed. (And we now know that this randomness will not go away, being the very essence of quantum phenomena.) There is, however, an essential difference between religious faith and scientific faith: dogma. In science, dogma is untenable. Sooner or later, even the deepest ingrained ideas — if proven wrong — must collapse under the weight of evidence. A scientist who holds on to an incorrect theory or hypothesis makes for a sad figure. In religion, given that evidence is either elusive or irrelevant, faith is always viable.

Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds. The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked.

What is the sky worth? This sounds like a philosophical question, but it might become a more concrete one. A report released last week by the National Research Council called for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. Such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. If albedo modification were actually implemented, Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers, told Joel Achenbach at The Washington Post: “You’d get whiter skies. People wouldn’t have blue skies anymore.” And, he added, “astronomers wouldn’t be happy, because you’d have a cloud up there permanently. It’d be hard to see the Milky Way anymore.”

last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”

Richard Serra’s new sculpture, “East-West/West-East,” is a set of four standing steel plates rolled in Germany, shipped via Antwerp, and offloaded, trucked, and craned into place in the middle of the western Qatari desert. It’s his second public commission in Qatar—the first, a towering sculpture titled “7,” is his tallest ever—and it is being unveiled, together with a new work, at the Al Riwaq exhibition space, in Doha. “East-West/West-East,” which spans the greatest area of any of Serra’s creations, is yet another grand piece of public art purchased by the Gulf nation. The Qatar Museums Authority is estimated to spend about a billion dollars per year on art. At its head is the young Sheikha al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a sister of the Emir of Qatar and a Duke University graduate, who was recently named the most powerful person in the art world by ArtReview.

For anyone who has endured clichéd, condescending, uncomprehending, or otherwise aggravating depictions of classical music in American TV ads—the snobs at the symphony, the sopranos screaming under Valkyrie helmets, the badly edited bowdlerizations of the “Ode to Joy”—a new ad for the Apple iPad featuring the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen may come as a pleasant shock. It is, first of all, a cool, elegant piece of work—not surprising, given Apple’s distinguished history of television propaganda. Salonen is shown receiving inspiration for a passage in his Violin Concerto and trying it out in his iPad; then, after a montage of scenes in London and Finland, we see the violinist Leila Josefowicz and the Philharmonia Orchestra, of London, digging in to the score. More notably, it is musical: the concerto dictates the rhythm of the editing, and the correlation between notation and sound is made excitingly clear.

Salzman first became interested in wine when he was a graduate student at Stanford University studying neuroscience (Ph.D.) and psychiatry (M.D.). “I was corrupted by some people who were very serious about wine,” he told me. Together, they would host wine tastings and travel to vineyards. Over time, as his interest in wine grew, he began to think about the connections between his tastings and the work he was doing on the ways in which emotion colors the way our brains process information. “We study how cognitive and emotional processes can affect perception,” he said. “And in the case of something like wine, you have the perfect example: even before you open a bottle to experience the wine itself, you already have an arbitrary visual stimulus—the bottle and the label—that comes with non-arbitrary emotional associations, good and bad.” And those emotional associations will, in turn, affect what we taste.

In one recent study, the Caltech neuroscientist Hilke Plassman found that people’s expectations of a wine’s price affected their enjoyment on a neural level: not only did they report greater subjective enjoyment but they showed increased activity in an area of the brain that has frequently been associated with the experience of pleasantness. The same goes for the color and shape of a wine’s label: some labels make us think that a wine is more valuable (and, hence, more tasty), while others don’t. Even your ability to pronounce a winery’s name can influence your appreciation of its product—the more difficult the name is to pronounce, the more you’ll like the wine.

For experts, though, the story is different. In 1990, Gregg Solomon, a Harvard psychologist who wrote “Great Expectorations: The Psychology of Expert Wine Talk,” found that amateurs can’t really distinguish different wines at all, but he also found that experts can indeed rank wines for sweetness, balance, and tannin at rates that far exceeded chance. Part of the reason isn’t just in the added experience. It’s in the ability to phrase and label that experience more precisely, a more developed sensory vocabulary that helps you to identify and remember what you experience. Indeed, when novices are trained, their discrimination ability improves.