The second installment of the SCIENCE CRIMES DIVISION series involves a murderer who remembers the future instead of the past. As I’ve been working through the plot, which is tricky, it occurred to me that […]
Category: Thought
(Sunday Thought) The Midas Mustache, or Death and the Rapture of Life
An old college buddy, now a lawyer, called me circa 2006 to tell me that the prop plane out of which I had jumped a few years earlier had crashed, killing two people. There was […]
(Sunday Thought) Anything easy to read was hard to write
The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said of one of his letters that he did not have the time to make it shorter, by which he meant that writing well, which surely includes writing […]
The Unreal
We thought we would invade and colonize cyberspace. In truth, the opposite is happening. We’re far from being able to transmute matter, of course, but ideas, rendered digitally, continue to creep over the border. We’re […]
(Sunday Thought) That’s Not How It Works
This article from Nautilus on common myths about the brain is important enough that it’s worth it to summarize the three myths for those hesitant to read the whole thing. I also add a fourth. […]
Couple very clever details in this art by AranniHK. First, of course, are the armed robots, having taken the place of the police, who are protecting those protesting them, which makes the entire act appear […]
(Sunday Thought) Life Expectancy is the Barometer of Society, and It’s Falling
As this article points out, COVID-19 isn’t the only thing shortening American lives. This past decade, life expectancy in the US began declining for the first time in generations. This reversal, which COVID only exacerbated, […]
(Sunday Thought) Gaslighting and Social Media
It’s been my consistent experience that you can’t “social media” your way to commercial success. But don’t take my word for it. For a long time, I thought it was me, or rather my writing. […]
(Sunday Thought) The Brescia Medallion
Several times, I’ve mention the Thinker of Cernavoda, a small, seven-thousand-year-old terracotta statue that is without a doubt my favorite work of art, and for largely the same reason I also love this piece, the […]
