One of my favorite futurist quotes comes from a 1956 Ford commercial called Design for Dreaming. In it, the main character sings (yes, it’s a musical) the line: “Everyone says the future is strange, but I have a feeling some things won’t change.” I love this quote for a lot of reasons, and I use […]
Miscellaneous
The other night I was in the midst of writing about the Ice Age when I strayed to the internet. Up came the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography that went this year to New York Times photographers Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter for their coverage of the European refugee crises. Fresh from writing a […]
Being a new parent is a lot like trying to land an airplane with an engine on fire: barely controlled chaos in which all kinds of people are yelling different ideas in your ears. None of it is all that helpful but no one is volunteering to take the controls either. How long should you breastfeed? How […]
April 11-15, 2016 Guest poster Liza Gross details the struggles of traditional societies within the United States to hold onto their cultures in the face of ongoing settler aggression. Helen used to have a messy desk. Did it mean she was badly behaved or more creative? Now she has a clean desk. Does that mean she’s the […]
April 4 – 8, 2016 “I must have caught this from that coughing bastard on the plane.” “Obviously, my husband’s little cold mutated into this nasty flu.” You feel like hell, you look around for something to blame. Christie reduxes a post about why you’re wrong. Xenotopias are those weird places that aren’t anything else, […]
This is a bit unusual, but I’ll start by asking you to watch this video. It’s not long, but I should warn you that it might upset you. It did me, which is why I am writing about it. It’s from a traffic cam trained on an intersection in Shandong Province, Eastern China. Here’s what it shows, […]
We live with machines. And our machines are getting smarter. They’re still very dumb, they do what we tell them to, and often not really all that well. But we’re teaching them. And I do mean “we.” When you tag your friends on Facebook, you’re teaching its facial recognition system what to look for in […]
This week the Last Word on Nothing, usually riffing on the theme of science, marked a week where we talked about anything but. Guest Judith Lewis Mernit traces Easter traditions to their odd combination of origins in a dead man risen and a fertility goddess. Rose spends her leisure hours in vicarious bladesmithing competitions. Followed […]
