Dr. Mary Lefkowitz is Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emerita at Wellesley College. She is the author of Not Out of Africa, Black Athena Revisited*, and History Lesson. She has also written several books about ancient Greece, including Women in Greek Myth and Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths and many others.

She will be talking about the “Black Athena Controversy”, the notion that Greek culture was stolen or borrowed from Egypt, and her attempts to talk about evidence-based history in the era of post-modernism and political correctness.

If this subject is new to you, as it is to me, having skillfully avoided academia in the 1980s and 90s, I recommend doing some background reading, or at least a bit of googling, in advance. (One of the Amazon reviews of one of her books compared arguing with Afro-centrists to arguing with anti-vaxxers, a conflict I’m more familiar with.)

We’re back to our usual place and time this month, upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s on Monday, November 28 at 7 PM.

Feel free to sign up on our Facebook event page.

[*] which she edited with Guy Rogers, though for some reason the Amazon page doesn’t mention him.

Our next SitP features two special guests (Mark Crislip and Kimball Atwood of Science Based Medicine) at a special time (8 PM) on a special day (Wednesday, October 19 instead of our usual Monday evening), and in a special place (the cozy, intimate basement of Tommy Doyle’s.) Aren’t we special?

Kimball and Mark will make a brief presentation followed by lots of hanging out and talking. For some ideas of the discussion topics, be sure to check out Mark’s podcast QuackCast and Kimball’s Naturowatch site, as well as SBM.

(Be forewarned! Tommy Doyle’s basement doesn’t have the state-of-the-art multimedia recording facilities of their upstairs room, so this may be your only chance to see this dynamic duo. Don’t miss it!)

Important Update! Note date and time change.

Our next book club meeting will be on Saturday, November 5 at 5 PM at one of the usual places. (Today, we met indoors in a nice conference room with left-over bagels at the far end of our usual building, due to scheduling conflicts and iffy weather.) Stay tuned for updates.

We decided to change the time to 5 PM date to November 5 so that people could attend both the Granite State Skeptics Skepticamp and the Book Club meeting.

Our book is going to be 3-time winner Mary Roach’s Stiff, in honor of Halloween.

Our guest speaker this month is Amanda Knief, Government Relations Manager of the Secular Coalition for America. Amanda will tell us “true tales of working as an atheist on Capitol Hill and with the Obama administration, and also how we need everyone to get involved.”

Could there be a better lead-in to Zombie and Vampire Season than the inside scoop on working in Washington?

We will be meeting at our regular time and place, at 7 PM on Monday, September 26. 2011, upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s, 96 Winthrop St in Harvard Square.

Our book club meeting this month is again at the usual place and time, 3 PM Saturday August 13 on the lawn just north of Harvard Yard, between Memorial Hall (the big ugly pseudo gothic building) and the Science Center (the big ugly modern building that looks like a flight of giant stairs to nowhere.) It’s supposed to be warm and sunny, but if it rains, we’ll move indoors to the cafeteria of the Northwest building up Oxford Street just past the museum.

The book is about the birth of forensic science (CSI: Lyon, as in Lyon, France, circa 1894.) I’m about 1/2 way through, the prime suspect is about to go to trial, and is attempting an insanity defense. It’s a pretty compelling story, all the more so because it’s true. The author alternates chapters between the story of the criminal, Joesph Vacher, and the history of forensics, mostly focusing on Professor Lacassagne of the Lyon Medical School, who was the leading forensic scientist of the time.

Dave is the president of the American Humanist Association.. Skeptical activism was a major theme at TAM 9 a few weeks ago and Dave will fill us in on the broad strategic issues facing the AHA and other secular groups, as well as the status of a recent lawsuit involving the AHA and the pledge of allegiance.

Agree or disagree with the proposition the the Skeptical and Secular Movements should be more involved in social activism[*], this promises to be an extremely interesting talk.

Date: Monday, August 29
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s
96 Winthrop St (Harvard Square)
Cambridge, MA

[*] If you disagree, you’re wrong :-)

Jonathan says:

NASA’s Space Shuttle is being retired this month after three decades of ups and downs both literal and metaphorical.

I’ll take a trip down memory lane and review what the Shuttles did and didn’t do, and discuss other spaceplanes past and present. Finally, I’ll speculate about what’s next for the US human spaceflight program.

Hello, Earthlings!

Jonathan is a long-time member of the Boston Skeptics, an astronomer, and expert on space travel. He writes a monthly column for Sky and Telescope and maintains the Jonathan’s Space Report web site. He previously spoke to us about the history of the Moon Race, in a very interesting, informative and popular talk, especially about the little-known Soviet moon program. Be sure to arrive early so you can get a seat in front!

RSVP on Facebook

When: Monday, July 25 at 7pm

Where: Upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s Irish Pub,
Harvard Square

See you all there!

Nerd-throb folksinger Marian Call will be here!

This isn’t officially a Boston Skeptics event, but we were instrumental (groan) in getting her to include Boston on her current tour and if you RSVP, everyone will know how popular she is and next time she’ll play the Boston Garden or Gillette Stadium.

She was totally awesome in November:
(Not a very good photo, I was trying to use available light but failed. She is much less blurry in person.)

Join us this month for a talk from Joshie Berger! Joshie is a skeptical comedian and the best Worst Cooks in America (Version 2.0)

Be prepared for a high energy rant, or maybe just some lovingly prepared gefilte fish.

When: Monday, June 27 at 7pm
Where: Upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s Irish Pub, Harvard Square
See you all there!

(The title was a typo the first time around, but I decided to go with it.)

Brunch at the Kinsale at Government Center on Sunday, June 19 at 11 AM.   See the Facebook page to RSVP.