So, LWON is eclipsing, on into next week. And if the internet is to be believed, half the country will be pulled north and the other half south and they’ll converge in the middle, on the path of totality. It’s charming, how a population that normally lives at arm’s length from earthly reality — milk […]
Ann: Please meet Adam Rogers. He wrote a story about DARPA looking for solutions to the credibility problems of social science, only what I’m calling “solutions to credibility problems,” he called bullshit detection. First, social science’s credibility problems. Here’s the way I said it in 2015: Start with any question involving human behavior or motivation and […]
July 31 – August 4, 2017 Jessa’s on a trip that’s so far out in the back of beyond that it needs a guide. The guide doesn’t show. But nobody quits. Michelle finds a splendid metaphor for surviving ridiculously unpleasant situations: imitate the reindeer and assume Arctic resignation. I redux the struggles that Helen and […]
This ran not that long ago, August 23, 2016. But I feel it should be run again because it has an important update. Recently, Helen and I made mint lemonade again, this time with Jenny. As the post suggests, we blended-and-spigoted at the same time, and instead of demarara sugar, we used white. The pond scum […]
I’d been reading a book by Colm Tóibín called House of Names. The house is the House of Atreus; Tóibín explained through a character why he substituted “names,” but I didn’t understand it. He took the story pretty faithfully from the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes about one or all members of the family. […]
July 10 – 14, 2017 Guest Elizabeth Preston’s baby — what’s she doing? what’s she thinking? Darwin had some ideas about that. Emma is in Tahiti — isn’t everyone? — and sees a flower so rare, so strange, so precious, that it has to be kept in a cage. If only mental illness were simple, […]
My friend and colleague, Sharon Weinberger, has a new book out called The Imagineers of War. It’s a history of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Agency, an agency with which she has had, as a journalist, a long and storied history. One of DARPA’s proposals was for a wearable jet pack. Just let that sink […]
I have a mild case of fatal familial obsessive-compulsive disorder. (At least, if that were real I’d have it.) Today’s obsession is the Fall Line. It’s the line that runs through the big east coast cities — New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Richmond, all the way down to Columbia SC and […]
