Putin’s Western apologists don’t reflect the usual conflict between Left and Right—but rather comprise an example of both poles making common cause against the center. | Continue reading
A review of ‘After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul,’ by Tripp Mickle (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2022). | Continue reading
The closure of Britain’s scandal-plagued youth gender clinic could help protect distressed children from unnecessary medicalisation. | Continue reading
For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by … | Continue reading
Not a single body has been unearthed. But Canadians wouldn’t know it from the false information reported in The New York Times. | Continue reading
How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence. | Continue reading
We tend to overestimate a technology’s abilities in the near term, and massively underestimate what it can do in the long term. | Continue reading
If Russia permanently cuts off natural gas exports to Germany, it will likely send the country, the world’s fourth-largest economy, into a severe recession. | Continue reading
California continues to implement policies on energy, housing, and transportation that are anti-poor and anti-working class. | Continue reading
In teaching students that all knowledge is constructed through their own interactions, we fail to give them satisfying answers about the world and its meaning. | Continue reading
‘This nagging feeling that she had an unfair advantage arose every time we hit each other in practice. For me, it was like hitting a brick wall.’ | Continue reading
Around 1987, Sagan gave an uncannily prescient lecture to the Illinois state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. | Continue reading
We’ve lost the ability to navigate our inner worlds, to sit with or navigate anything uncomfortable. We avoid, push away, or lash out because we don’t know how to handle discomfort. | Continue reading
The death threats have definitely gone upscale. Fifteen years ago, they were quite uncouth. As one put it: “time to find out where Milewski lives and put his head on a stick.” Over time, though, they’ve become a little more polished. Okay, the little gun needs no translation. Bu … | Continue reading
Apparently, selling mugs and shirts that glorify violence against ‘TERFs’ is just fine. But ‘I 💜 J.K. Rowling‘? That‘s hate speech. | Continue reading
The dignity that comes with a job is more important than the salary. | Continue reading
Much of history is a tale of excessive offense-taking. | Continue reading
After paring back the useless majors, ideologies, and gimmicks, the true purpose of college becomes clear. | Continue reading
The Uyghurs have the potential to threaten China's national unity, which is the real reason we are seeing the largest incarceration of an ethnic or religious minority since the Holocaust. | Continue reading
I made pretty pictures that helped keep people enraged and mobilized. Then I asked myself: ‘Why am I doing this?‘ | Continue reading
Editor's note: this is the second in a three-part series on how we can get clean energy. Part I explains the relationship between Fuel and Human Progress, Part II answers the question “Is Nuclear Power Safe?” and Part III provides an answer to “What Needs to Be Done?” A lot | Continue reading
In my second year as a high school teacher, my school district rolled out its “iPad Initiative.” Each of our district’s five high schools issued an iPad to every student. Within a few years, students at the middle school and the elementary level would have them, as well. Like | Continue reading
Roland Fryer Jr.’s life is a movie script: A man abandoned by his mom and raised by an alcoholic dad became the youngest black professor to ever secure tenure at Harvard University. After ascending to the academic elite, Fryer didn’t resign himself to irrelevant technical puzzles … | Continue reading
The declarations from Disney’s executive leadership have been agonizing and predictable, remarkable only for their robotic conformity. On March 11th, Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek released a statement which began like this: To my fellow colleagues, but especially our LGBTQ+ community, … | Continue reading
During my three decades as a reporter, I’ve seen plenty of hype and poor news coverage about renewable energy. But two recent pieces—in the Washington Post and National Public Radio, respectively—are particularly egregious. These reports demonstrate, yet again, that some of the b … | Continue reading
I am an Englishman in Southern Russia. For nearly four years I’ve lived here, helping my Russian ex-partner bring up our (now) eight-year-old daughter. At 9 o’clock last night I saw both of them onto a sleeper-train to Moscow. From there they will fly to Italy and the | Continue reading
On February 8th, scientists associated with the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion experimental facility located in Oxfordshire, UK, announced that they had achieved a sustained fusion reaction releasing 11 megawatts of thermonuclear fusion power burning a deuterium-tritium plasma … | Continue reading
Over the last few years we have witnessed the alarming growth of both left-wing and right-wing populist movements in both the developed world and countries with fragile democratic traditions. Although pundits and political scientists continue to debate the precise definition of “ … | Continue reading
Diamond is the most valuable, not only of precious stones, but of all things in this world. -Pliny The Elder Loving someone, and having them love you back, is the most precious thing in the world. -Nicholas Sparks The Notebook At age 11, I first glimpsed the bewildering anthropo … | Continue reading
At the American university where I teach, one of my assigned tasks is to advise undergraduates—mostly freshmen and sophomores. This essay describes a conversation I had in 2017 with one of those advisees. I will call him Daniel. Daniel was a sophomore at the time. He had been an | Continue reading
As a skinny, unathletic nerd, I had no desire to play high-school football. Fortunately, no one compelled me to do so. Even if I could have become an adequate player by expending massive effort, much of the time I spent playing would have come at the expense of learning things | Continue reading
For decades, it has been common to call authoritarian new laws, norms, or government actions “Orwellian.” In 1984, George Orwell so brilliantly portrayed a nightmarish future that his name became synonymous with almost anything one wishes to describe as oppressive. Aldous Huxley’ … | Continue reading
Respect for reason has waxed and waned throughout history. Today, its tide is receding. University professors resign in frustration from what were once our bastions of rationality. Increasingly, the barbarians are not merely at the gates, but running the show in a vast swathe of … | Continue reading
Many universities have a problem—on this point there seems to be widespread agreement. The nature of that problem, however, remains bitterly contested. Liberals and conservatives worry that higher education has succumbed to regressive radicalism on matters related to race and gen … | Continue reading
Imperial College London was founded in 1907. It is one of the top 20 universities in the world, and among the leading technical universities in Europe. Two individuals were central to its foundation. The first is 19th-century English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who became know … | Continue reading
NOTE: The pioneering American biologist Edward O. Wilson passed away on December 26th, aged 92. The following interview was conducted by phone on August 24th, 2009, as part of Alice Dreger’s research for her book Galileo’s Middle Finger. The text has been lightly edited for lengt … | Continue reading
The Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, that country’s major scientific funding organization, is developing a comprehensive research plan, called NSERC 2030, to guide its priorities over the next decade. In the current phase, NSERC is engaging with externa … | Continue reading
The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse provides the public with a glimpse of criminal law in practice. Many think of the law as a series of rules—a set of binaries. Do this. Don’t do that. But this trial has put in stark relief the dueling values that underwrite our | Continue reading
Ever since the release of James Cameron’s 1984 blockbuster, The Terminator, Schwarzenegger and Skynet have served as cultural touchstones—symbols of an economic and existential threat. Now, the long-awaited proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems finally to have … | Continue reading
In line with the biology of sexual reproduction and evolutionary pressure on reproductive fitness, males and females are physically different. Physical divergence begins with primary sex development at around seven weeks in utero when, triggered by genetic information inherited a … | Continue reading
In 2017, I got the welcome news that I’d been admitted to Princeton University. At the time, I was ecstatic. And I remain humbly grateful for the education I received there. But now that I’ve graduated, I’m not sure the prize was worth the price I paid | Continue reading
Editor's note: what follows is a lightly edited excerpt of The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down, by Jonathan Gotschall, published by Basic Books (November 2021). In the mid-2000s I set out, along with my colleagues Joseph Carroll, … | Continue reading
America has always had an uneasy relationship with brilliance. Cultural tropes, like the mad scientist or the nerdy computer whiz, show both a respect for high accomplishment and an anxiety about how smart people fit into society. This cultural uneasiness is most apparent in the … | Continue reading
A review of High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism by David S. Wills. Beatdom Books, 555 pages. (November 2021) I. In High White Notes, his riveting new biography of Hunter S. Thompson, journalist David S. Wills describes Thompson as America’s first rock star rep … | Continue reading
Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, was a warrior’s warrior. Hawk-nosed, ambitious, and brash, Philip had been a soldier since childhood. He was still a smooth-faced boy of 14 when he fought alongside his father, King John II of France, in the battle of Poitiers in 1356. Like King | Continue reading
Astronomy seems to be in trouble, as it is increasingly populated by researchers who seem more concerned with terrestrial politics than celestial objects, and who at times view the search for truths about nature as threatening. This became obvious in recent years, once the propos … | Continue reading
Two months into my first semester as a doctoral student, Donald Trump was elected. A few years later the coronavirus hit. That summer George Floyd was murdered. Each of these events, along with many less seismic ones in between, elicited a similar response from the faculty, stude … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago I published an article in the Wall Street Journal describing the tyranny that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies are imposing on universities and scientific institutions. This includes excluding talented scientists who are not effective eno … | Continue reading