For three long years now America has been ravaged by the highly infectious and potentially lethal disease Covfefe-16. You may recall that...

I love The Guardian: it's one of the best news sources in the world. I feel guilty about The Guardian: I use it every day and ought to...

A lot of people are being tested for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. (Not enough in my neck of the planet, thanks to our...

Listening to NPR yesterday, I was informed (is that the right word?): "There are only 60 confirmed cases of infection by the Covid-19...

Today's quote of the day from The Browser - which I recommend to everyone - struck a cord for me. It's a commonplace in our culture to...

Reading all the depressing news about plastic, which has now found its way to the bottom of the Marianas Trench – I’m reminded again of a...

The latest mass shootings by home-grown American terrorists come during a massive corruption scandal at the organization popularly known...

What if you had to move – not to another city or country but to either the future or the past? I ran across this Rawlesian thought...

I’ve just read a review by David Quammen of Dutch biologist Menno Schilthuizen’s Darwin Comes To Town. Apparently, rapid speciation is...

The excellent and hugely underrated philosopher Mary Midgley has died at the age of 99, shortly after completing yet another book. (She...

After so many headlines about the men who  want to turn the world into kindling and warm their hands over the flames (in just this...

Not an actual picture of the individual in question Fascinating – working in the Russian cave where bones of Denisovans were first found,...

Philosophers are still reading Aristotle, and still arguing about whether there is free will: ergo, philosophy is useless. It has always...

In the timeline at the end of Infinity’s Illusion, which isn’t even officially published until next week, I apologize slightly for...

Sumiteru Taniguchi, Nagasaki victim and lifelong anti-nuclear activist, died just over a month ago. It’s a shame he didn’t live to hear...

After a drive from Seattle to L.A., straight down I-5, I took a more easterly, more scenic route home through a swath of America I’d...

Graham’s Number, folksily abbreviated to “g64,” was long famous as the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof. I quote...

Thirty six years ago, as a student, I wrote to the then Minister of Defense, Francis Pym, to argue that both the enormously expensive...

One minor character in my Ghosts n the Machine is the Slipher Space Telescope. This is me giving a big fat fictional hint to NASA, in...

The Bretz Erratic, a giant rock, plays a minor role in the plot of Ghosts in the Machine, but it doesn’t exist, no—it just seemed like a...