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  • Quick! Get This Man to a Homeopathic Hospital!

    There’s something particularly insidious about homeopathy, isn’t there? I can’t put my finger on it, but something about it gets under my skepto-atheist skin more than almost any other kind of pseudoscientific malarky. I think it has something to do with the fact that things like religion and faith are kind of vague and etherial,…

  • Collective Genius and Brains in Vats

    I’ve at times felt some discomfort of the idea of the “genius,” maybe chiefly because I discovered I am not one, much to my delusional childhood chagrin. But the more one knows about one’s brilliant heroes, who despite having powerful creative and intellectual gifts are also rife with human flaws, one begins to see that…

  • Your Unique Amalgam: On the Fluidity of Geekhood

    I had assigned myself* the task of writing a post about what it is to be a “geek.” It’s obviously not the same as it was when I was in school, as geekhood no longer implies utter alienation from the mainstream, but being part of a kind of cultural elite, a kind of priesthood that…

  • The Old School Transformers Movie You’ve Been Wishing For

    There hasn’t been a Generation-1 Transformers animated movie since Transformers: The Movie (discussed in depth on my podcast) in 1986. As excited as many folks my age were that the Transformers were coming to live-action film in 2007, despite the return of Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime, the Michael Bay versions clearly aren’t quite…

  • What Old Dad Can Offer

    Lee Siegel on being the father of young kids while in his 50s: [I]t isn’t too difficult to squelch the regret that I didn’t have children at a younger age. If I had, I wouldn’t be experiencing the joy of these two particular precious darlings. I wouldn’t have known a little more about life, as…

  • Stuck Outside of the Comic Books Multiverse

    As a nerd, it really does seem that I ought to be into comic books, but it just never happened. As a pre-teen, eventually I became devoted to The Transformers comics, but that had more to do with my love of the bots than any inclination toward comic books. I also dabbled around that age with Teenage Mutant…

  • A Ravenous Insistence on Having an Opinion

    Andy Greenwald, in a post that’s really about the show Louie, diagnoses the tweetosphere: “We live in an era of opinions. In the Internet economy — in which I am a loyal and grateful participant! — loud voices are more than just currency, they’re coal. The Outrage Industrial Complex burns all day and all night with Twitter…

  • “I’m Sure We’ll Hear of Him, Very Soon.”

    “Yes, the soon-to-be-famous Jeff…Dun-Ham…with his puppets.”  

  • Rocks

    I usually really don’t like going to the beach, but I acquiesce for the sake of getting the kids out of the house, plus my wife really loves it. But today, I had a blast. It was cool, the sun was unoppressive, the kids were having a good time, but mostly, I became fascinated by…

  • Twitter Tsunamis of Desperate Signaling

    Alan Jacobs on the swarm of me-too righteousness online, in the form of “Twitter tsunamis.” This kind of thing always makes me want to flee Twitter, even when I am deeply sympathetic to the positions people are taking. It’s a test of my charity, and a test I usually fail. To me these tsunamis feel like desperate signaling, people…

  • We Are All Short Now

    Reihan Salam writes on short men’s failure to collectively reject heightism, and it’s a piece so good I found myself highlighting more than half of it for potential excerpt here. Rather than do that, let’s see if I can get to the meat of it. First, a good description of the problem: As I go through…

  • Peak Outrage and the Exhausted Amygdala

    Why have I lost interest in politics, when it was once such a passion of mine that I left theatre and performing Shakespeare for a living to pursue it? John Dickerson gets it. In a piece about the titanic clusterfuck that is the VA, he writes: One primary reason to despair is that we’re already…

  • Being a Bully is Good for You

    The old trope has it that while bullies make your life hell during your years in school, once you’re all grown up and in the world, the bullies’ targets all become successful and self-assured while the bullies themselves wind up in crappy, dead-end jobs, miserable and full of regret and self-loathing. No. Researchers at Duke…

  • Dreaming of Ice-Roofed Worlds

    I have been moved. Lee Billings at Aeon writes about the decent chance for life on Europa, relative to Mars at least, and makes a strong case for making it a much bigger exploratory focus than our dead, red neighbor. But even more fascinating is his speculation about how the discovery of life on Europa could indicate…

  • “Just Bring the Kids” is an Option. But it is One That Sucks.

    Maybe this will help you understand. Christine Skoutelas at A Morning Grouch enlightens those without children as to why she and other people with kids seem to socially disappear. (Now, I’m inclined to socially disappear anyway, but having kids only turns it from a predeliction to a kind of existential necessity.) Here’s two parts to her post that really stood out…