When We Cease to Understand the World

A review of Benjamin Labatut’s award-nominated collection. They are well-worn clichés: the scientist as tortured genius; the idiot savant who peers unblinkingly into the secrets of the universe while forgetting to eat or bathe; or, at the most superficial, scientists as hopeless nerds, whip-smart but clueless when it comes to “regular” people and their quotidian …

Don’t Look Up

[A review of writer/director Adam McKay’s new sci-fi farce, now streaming on Netflix.] We may very well be in the last days of the American Republic. America has been dysfunctional and divided before (see: the Civil War; the Civil Rights Movement), but our current era of partisan rancor seems unprecedented. The internet promised to bring …

The Kentucky-Darwin Connection

Step just inside the front entrance of the University of Kentucky’s historic Miller Hall and you might notice a brass plaque on the righthand side titled Freedom of Inquiry, the Teaching of Evolution, and the “Monkey Trial”. The plaque reads, in full: In March 1922, the Kentucky House of Representatives debated a bill to prohibit the teaching …

Guns in America (Again)

I would have thought by now that we’d realize that mass shootings (even in schools!) aren’t a flaw in our system; at this point, given what we know, they’re an intentional feature. We know from study after study, from one statistical analysis to another, that we have excess fatalities because of the number of guns …

What the 2nd Amendment Really Means

“The very existence of the Second Amendment is designed purposefully to empower the people to be able to resist the force of tyranny used against them to step over their natural rights given to them by God. That is why the Second Amendment exists. That is very specifically why the Second Amendment exists.” – Congressman …

The Fall of Afghanistan

The news out of Afghanistan is shocking, to be sure–but mostly because of the speed of the Taliban reconquest. I don’t know anyone who didn’t think that if the US and our allies exited Afghanistan that the Taliban (or ilk) wouldn’t be in charge eventually. But now it looks like the Taliban will have established …