I’m not getting any less mad about this, didn’t you hear me the first time? The New World, when the Old World was full of all kinds of people, had nobody. NOBODY WAS HERE. THEY ALL CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. Everybody here was at some point AN IMMIGRANT. And yes, I’m shouting, why can’t […]
Baltimore in August: I was out on my early-morning walk, I don’t even know the temperature or humidity or feels-like combination, I’ve given up caring but all numbers were high, and I ran into a neighbor going the same way so we walked together for a bit. We were neither one of us built for […]
Three years ago I wrote a post about boundary conditions, those irrevocabilities that set limits on our lives. (You don’t like having limits? you want to negotiate limits? too bad. Boundary conditions like uncertainty and change, for instance, you want security? too bad; you want to make plans? too bad. Or old age, too bad; […]
This first ran September 24, 2015; since then I have stopped going to that coffeeshop and no longer see Larry and John, its chief scientists, and in fact I hardly remember what they looked like and the coffeeshop moved anyway. Time is an illusion, you say? not when so much stuff undeniably happens in it; […]
For years I’ve been mildly obsessed with this idea, that “history” and “story” are related, they’re siblings if not actually the same creature. And that the relation lies in human cultures that didn’t read, didn’t write, communicated only by talking. I’m not sure why that seems so absurd and fascinating, history and story being the […]
I wrote this on May 7, 2018 and I have no idea why it feels like I wrote it this morning, looking out my window and wondering what I was looking for. I’ve always done this, looked out my window and wondered why I was doing that, what was out there, what was I looking […]
I like to run this post on Memorial Day (the first version ran May 28, 2012) because when I think about soldiers and wars and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy. He was awfully opinionated and excessively direct but I admired him greatly and listened when he talked. Not he ever talked about the […]
This was first posted on November 17, 2017. The latest explanation of gamma ray bursts are that they’re massive stars going supernovae and collapsing immediately to black holes and in the process, aiming high-intensity jets at our skies. They’re still the brightest things in the universe, the brightness of a trillion suns, and they last […]