editor's pick
A dry run to save the planet: NASA DART probe closing in on asteroid impact
Reading Time: 6 minutes NASA’s DART spacecraft will crash into an asteroid on September 26, the first real-life test of planetary defense techniques.
Entropy, time, and the arrow of adolescence
Is there an inherent link between entropy and the momentum of time?
The night I called Code Lavender
July 1995. It was my first night of internship, the next step after medical school. I’d already admitted a half dozen patients to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit from the emergency room under the watch of a third-year resident. The CCU was the scariest first-night internship assignment there was.
Maybe religion isn’t dying, but it’s definitely not well
Reading Time: 6 minutes In their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Byron R. Johnson and Jeff Levin, referring to a paper they recently published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion (IJRR), argue that religiosity is not declining in the US but rather, “Americans are becoming more
‘The Great Replacement’: How New Atheists legitimized and spread a white nationalist conspiracy theory
Reading Time: 17 minutes A string of deadly far-right attacks across the globe in the past decade or so had one thing in common: a white nationalist conspiracy theory known as The Great Replacement. From Utoya, Norway in 2011 to the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, El Paso, Texas and Chri
The middle of history
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.
Lack of trust is the universal acid
Reading Time: 4 minutes Our greatest accomplishments sprang from an era of trust and cooperation. Without trust, all our institutions crumble.
Will I go gentle?
Reading Time: 9 minutes OnlySky · Will I go gentle? | Dale McGowan If you haven’t visited The Death Clock, you really must. Enter your date of birth, height, weight and Body Mass Index, and the Death Clock spits out the day and date on which you’ll hear the galloping hooves of the pale horse. Mine i
‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ retains magnetic hold on Gen Z, one year later
Reading Time: 7 minutes Return with me, if you will, to May 2021. Another summer was rounding the corner, and we were still locked inside of our homes. What many assumed at first would be a temporary lifestyle change had proven stubborn beyond our wildest fears. “This was supposed to be two weeks, n
Between massacres: a uniquely American horror show in seven acts
Reading Time: 7 minutes A shooter enters a building in an American city and takes innocent lives. The name of the shooter is insignificant, while their race and gender are both significant and mostly predictable. The city is Buffalo, or Uvalde, or East Lansing, or Monterey Park, or a hundred others.
Dying out loud
A terminal ALS diagnosis led Dave Warnock to a question: Would he spend his remaining time trying to stay alive, or living?
Why did the color violet go viral after 1863?
Allen Tager has spent the new millennium thus far trying to find out why the color violet is so difficult to find through thousands of years of human history—until suddenly it was everywhere.