Pink Is Not Her Color

    * It’s October, which means pink ribbons everywhere you turn. These breast cancer awareness campaigns can be hopeful and empowering, but they can also be deceptive and unscientific and can mask the realities of what it means to live with cancer. Catherine Guthrie’s new memoir, FLAT: Reclaiming My Body From Breast Cancer offers […]

Be an Arc Bender

I have a friend who is worried about our country. Haw haw. Who am I kidding? All my friends are worried about our country, every single one of them, even the Republicans I know. We are living through an incredibly bonkers and troubling moment: climate change is starting to actively bite us in the ass […]

Redux: The Internet Is a Series of Lead Tubes

This post was originally published all the way back in 2015. I thought the internet was weirdly corrosive and anxiety inducing then, and the past three years certainly haven’t removed that feeling. I stand by this analogy today.  Like many of you, I suspect, I have a love hate relationship with the internet. I love […]

Redux: Garwin: The Movie

I’ve been talking to Richard Garwin recently and thought I’d run this again. The original had an update, not included here, that read: This post originally said the document on the computer screen is classified, and though it once was, it certainly no longer is. No one who knows Garwin would think he’d allow the […]

Redux: Who’s afraid of Roko’s Basilisk?

It looks like the Basilisk definitely got him, so it’s worth resurfacing the explainer I wrote earlier this year.   If you’re like most people, you haven’t heard of Roko’s Basilisk. If you’re like most of the people who have heard of Roko’s Basilisk, there’s a good chance you started to look into it, encountered […]

In the “Synthetic Age,” can technology save nature?

Christopher Preston is a philosopher at the University of Montana, but he’s originally from England. Moving to the American West changed him. “First I was in Colorado and then Alaska and Oregon. Here I was having encounters with spectacular charismatic animals and elemental processes like glaciers grinding through valleys.” His first week in the states […]

Redux: Resistance Begins at Home

Not long ago I read The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, an excellent and, sadly, extremely relevant history by Linda Gordon. Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the KKK of the 1920s targeted not only African-Americans but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants of all nationalities, […]

Guest Post: Ethnicity and Entrée in an Environmental Wasteland

Riau, Indonesia looks nothing like the white sand beaches, impenetrable rainforests, or volcanoes that tourists might typically associate with the country. Instead, palm oil plantations blanket the province’s hilly landscape. Thick black pipes outline the cramped, two-way roads that connect towns, pumping petrol from the ground. Rubber, acacia, or eucalyptus plantations begin when the palm […]