I've just finished Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now.  It's a thoroughly bracing read - bracing in the sense that you sometimes feel that you're having buckets of cold water thrown over you, but also that you emerge as, well, a more enlightened person:  inevitably better informed but also better equipped to defend the values of inquiry, evidence and rationality that are so often missing in today's discussions (cf Brexit passim). Pinker's basic approach on any given issue is to beat you about the head with data, but to do it in such an accessible and stylishly written way that it's mostly a pleasure as well as a lesson.  He covers an implausibly wide…