Not long ago I read The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, an excellent and, sadly, extremely relevant history by Linda Gordon. Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the KKK of the 1920s targeted not only African-Americans but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants of all nationalities, […]
History/Philosophy
Once upon a time there was a fossil seller and paleontologist named Mary Anning. In the early 19th century, she and her brother found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton. In the early 21st century, we immortalized her in marshmallow form. Presenting Mary Anning, Paleontolopeep: A diorama by Joanna Church, Helen Fields and Kate Ramsayer. Mary […]
UPDATE, 10/27/2020: This post is about, among other things, Peter Ganz, a German philologist with an unlikely personal history. One of his sons, Adam, just wrote telling me about a centenary at Oxford University that celebrates Peter’s accomplishments. I thought you might like to know. I mean, the man left Buchenwald, then helped spy on […]
If you are planning a huge, calorie-dense feast for dinner later this week, you might want to take a moment to thank a man you’ve likely never heard of—a man whose scientific breakthroughs in agriculture made food cheaper and more plentiful around the world. Norman Borlaug may have saved up to a billion lives by […]
Years ago, talking about the persistent rumor that the Hubble Space Telescope was an off-the-shelf spy satellite retrofitted for astronomy*, I told a NASA employee that I was pretty sure academic astronomers were culturally anti-military and they wouldn’t be crossing lines and dealing with spies or the defense department. The NASA employee looked at me […]
My alma mater is, for better or worse, the undergraduate equivalent of a cult film: Most people have never heard of Reed College, and the few who have really like to argue about it. So it’s disconcerting when arguments usually confined to the Reed campus attract national attention. In recent days, a Washington Post column […]
So. Everybody got excited about gravitational waves coming from the mergers of neutron stars and black holes. My Facebook feed which is full of scientists and science writers got further excited about a newish phrase everybody used, “multimessenger astronomy.” My Facebook feed agreed that “multimessenger astronomy” is an all-around dreadful phrase. Not only does it sound corporate and […]
Last spring, I wrote a story about the origin and evolution of “endling,” a word used to describe the sole surviving member of a species. Endling was coined in the mid-1990s by Robert Webster, a Georgia doctor who, during his work at a convalescent center, realized that there was no precise English word for a […]
