AG’s mouseover says, “When I forget to charge my phone at night, my existence feels incomplete in the morning,” meaning I guess that he’s become as one with his electronic devices. But as I know because I’ve been writing an interminable story about insomnia, AG’s identity as an electronic device is just the God’s truth. […]
April 7 – 11, 2014 This week we say a sad but temporary ciao to Sally and a delighted ecco! to Craig Childs, and no, I don’t have a clue what he’s doing in that photograph. Sports programs measuring themselves by winning instead of by kick-ass players who also know how to lose are, says […]
Garwin: the Movie opens with an old, steady, precise hand on a computer keyboard, scrolling through now-declassified* documents. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower make announcements, and newspapers flash headlines about our splendid new hydrogen bomb. Then the blossom of a mushroom cloud unfolds; and John F. Kennedy talks about Russian missiles in Cuba; and the […]
March 31 – April 4, 2104 Richard: “But in a way, Kepler had beat him to it. By imagining the universe from the point of view of someone on the Moon, he’d discovered a new planet: Earth.” Guest Stephen Ornes: “The theorems, proofs, and equations of mathematics are Big Ideas distilled to their naked cores. […]
As a literate but functionally innumerate person, I hate AG’s title. I think it’s dumb and silly. But I thoroughly get why he feels the way he does about that equation. Really. What an odd pattern. Why would it happen? Would figuring out why it happened help you understand anything else? No? You couldn’t even […]
March 24 – 28, 2014 Richard’s redux post: he went to the real true South Pole, had a chance to stand on it and didn’t but it changed his perspective anyway. Erik went to Tulsa, met a bookseller who had gone to the third world and done the best thing he ever did, better than most […]
Ann: Will Storr is a phenomenon.* His specialty is writing good stories about people in bad places. He’s got a story in Matter about an extremely unpleasant disease called Morgellons. People with Morgellons have terrible itches, then tiny fibers creep out of their skin and make oozy sores. The disease sounds like a horror story out […]
The latest snowstorm was only somewhere around 5 inches, depending where in the yard I stuck my ruler, and as usual the Capital Weather Gang had nailed it. I’d written them asking if I could interview them for this post, but at the time they didn’t answer, so intent they were on predicting the upcoming […]
