Here’s my question: why should anyone on earth care if college student Brett Kavanaugh once got into a bar fight that resulted in no charges—or once precipitated a bar fight by reacting to an insult by throwing the contents of … Continue reading →
The answer might seem obvious, but I think it’s more complicated than most people might think. Let’s leave out accusers who are telling the truth. I’m interested in the ones who are not. They can have multiple motives, too. This … Continue reading →
This post isn’t really about Kavanaugh and Ford, although obviously that’s the jumping-off spot. It’s about the larger issues that the controversy reflects, which have to do with the nature of justice. Robert Frost (yes, that Robert Frost) had this … Continue reading →
This is starting to sound like a Philip K. Dick novel: “People say, ‘Well, what about Facebook – they create and use algorithms and they can change them.’ But that’s not how it works. They set the algorithms off and … Continue reading →
[NOTE: It might help to have read this previous post of mine, about free-climbing El Capitan, before reading the present post.] This article is about Dean Potter, a free-climbing star who died in a base-jumping accident in 2015. It was … Continue reading →
Commenter “Ariel” addresses these remarks by another commenter in this way: …”but [Trump’s] policies are overall working pretty well” How the hell can you know that? I say this from watching George Bush blamed for the housing crash when it … Continue reading →
Food for cosmic thought [hat tip: commenter “Mrs Whatsit”). I don’t really buy the application of the multiple personality template to the universe as a whole. I have, however, read a number of fascinating articles recently on the idea of … Continue reading →
Here’s an excellent article by Coleman Hughes. I’d not heard of Hughes before today, but I plan to follow his work with interest, because this article shows much common sense (of the type that has become more and more uncommon) … Continue reading →
That’s the subtitle of an article in Foreign Policy. It describes traditional but still-existent customs of many Amazon tribes in Brazil that dictate killing handicapped children and even those one might define as transgendered, and a controversy in Brazil over … Continue reading →
This article about how head injuries sometimes (although very very rarely) lead to savant powers made me think (once again) of the Jorge Luis Borges story “Funes, the Memorious.” Fortunately, the work appears in its entirety online, so if you … Continue reading →
It doesn’t surprise me. I never wanted to live in New York, although I grew up there and most of the people I knew wanted to stay there the rest of their lives—and have done so. Not me. I always … Continue reading →
…than are dreamt of in your philosophy: The individual galaxies in galaxy clusters are held together by dark matter, according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. During the universe’s first few million years, dark matter (and normal matter) began to … Continue reading →