Airplanes and Bees

If you were to think about it, where would you think the first eyewitness account of one of the Wright brothers’ flights would have appeared in print? I’d guess the New York Times, maybe. A local newspaper in North Carolina or Ohio. Perhaps a venerable old science magazine like Scientific American. Well, I would be […]

Words to leave behind

As we entered the third decade of the third millennium, many of the science and tech words and phrases in popular circulation had lost all meaning. “AI”, “machine learning” and their newer synonym, “cognitive technology”, for example, had joined the pantheon of synonyms for “snake oil“. Or at least they were becoming placeholders for anything […]

A kind of ghost story

Sometime in the 1920s, somewhere in France. A young girl from an influential middle-class French family had been found in a field, stabbed to death. There was no obvious perpetrator. The police rounded up the usual suspects – which is to say, immigrants – and found a Jewish door-to-door salesman who had been in the […]

Actually, Twitter is a biowaste gasification facility

“Twitter is a sewer,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens last week in one of the many skirmishes that have now coalesced into the phenomenon known as Bedbug-gate. The ongoing saga is quite beyond the remit of this blog (though we do a brisk trade in actual bedbugs). But I’ll take Stephens’ sewer […]

Designed with today’s fast-paced world in mind

A poem composed entirely of excerpts from press releases for CBD products More than 20 years of experience at the pulse of the global health and wellness industry– My two passions: spreading the word about CBD and caring for my beloved dogs. We put our products into service by integrating bodywork, esthetics, yoga and other […]

Intermittent fasting, but for Twitter

Apologies in advance, but I’m a person who quit Twitter for a month and now you’re going to have to endure the lessons I learned from my time away. Don’t worry: this post contains 0 percent yoga. And I’m still on Twitter. Look, you may not care about Twitter, but I had a problem. I’m […]

On Competence

When a society uses a suite of technologies that a single adult can master in his or her lifetime—building a house from scratch, farming, spinning cotton, making medicines, having babies, hunting, fishing, singing and dancing—then it is possible to attain a high level of competency in nearly every major task an adult may be called […]