Science
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Living in the Future March 24, 2025
Let loose on an unprepared world in November 2022, ChatGPT quickly showed itself to be a stunning advance in the field of artificial intelligence. Indeed, the Large Language Model proved such a good conversationalist that many were left with the dist...
It is Not Good to Read (Only) Alone March 24, 2025
Over the past few years, I have seen a number of debates and research studies critically evaluating the different mediums in which people consume books in the twenty-first century: Reading on paper versus reading on screens (e.g., iPad or Kindle) ver...
The Cholesterol Cult March 24, 2025
A reply to a Tweet from Elon Musk last year illustrates two opposing beliefs about human health:Musk: Wow, steak & eggs with coffee in the morning really feels like a powerup!Brian Krassenstein: Sounds like a heart attack in the long-term.Whether he ...
The Beatles’ Brilliant Friendship March 20, 2025
John Lennon described what Bowie did in his glam rock days as “just rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on”. I was in the lipstick camp. But if Ziggy was from Mars (magical realism with a dash of science fiction) and the Beatles were from Liverpool (trippy s...
‘Severance’ Is Finally Back January 15, 2025
At 3:04 a.m. on May 24, 2010, Dan Erickson logged on to Facebook and updated his status with nine simple words: “Dear Lost. It was perfect. Thank you. Love, Dan.”Lost had aired its series finale earlier that night, bringing to a close six seasons of ...
‘Experts’ Killed Trust in Vaccines January 15, 2025
Vaccination rates against childhood diseases have been on a downward slide for the past few years in the United States. Nationally, for example, the share of kindergarteners with completed records for the measles vaccine dropped to 93 percent last ye...
Academia Must Come to Terms With the GOP January 09, 2025
To become a class enemy is a misfortune, but to cultivate such status is a blunder. Right-wing populists chose American academics and intellectuals generations ago as their class enemies. More than 50 years ago, Vice President Spiro Agnew labeled soc...
American Culture Needs More 'Whiplash' January 06, 2025
Vivek Ramaswamy’s critique of American culture ignited a firestorm on X — and people are taking away the wrong lessons from the exchanges.In Ramaswamy’s post, he nodded to the 2014 film Whiplash, a psychological thriller about expectations and ambiti...
A Prophet of Modern Politics January 03, 2025
Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) is the most notable among his early political pamphlets, and perhaps his most famous overall alongside the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). While the Reflections ha...
From “Fringe” to Mainstream November 29, 2024
Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Colli...
The Health Gurus of Hereticon November 26, 2024
If you’re someone who goes to the gym, eats healthy, and spends way too much time on X, odds are you’ve stumbled across the fascinating world of Health Twitter™ — a community, thousands strong, of everyday poasters (some with medical expertise, some ...
Anthropology in Retreat November 25, 2024
Many anthropologists place social-justice ideology over verifiable facts, from denying the sex binary to spinning false narratives of mass child graves in Indian schools to recasting “indigenous knowledge” as a source of scientific evidence. To this ...
How to Accelerate Science November 19, 2024
The exponential growth in scientific knowledge, and the myriad technological innovations it has spawned over the past two centuries, has given rise to the expectation that scientific progress will continue to accelerate. Superficially, this remains t...
The Real Science Behind the Billionaire Pursuit of Immortality May 09, 2024
Jonathan An tries to ignore the hype about new life-extension treatments, but it’s caught up to him anyway.He has heard the gospel of the longevity influencers, including that one multimillionaire who has been on a media campaign for months claiming ...
Our Humdrum Dystopia May 02, 2024
Walking around in New York in 2024 is an odd experience. While the framework of street life, to the naked eye, is largely the same as it was, say, 20 years ago, there are flashes—touches—of dystopian science fiction. Uptown, where I live, it’s genuin...
Why We Still Need Dr Freud March 19, 2024
Not much is uncontroversial when it comes to the life and work of Sigmund Freud, but one thing ought to be: he was a lousy psychotherapist. Take the case of his patient Horace Frink, who Freud diagnosed with a serious case of latent homosexuality, pr...
What's American Fiction Without the Short Story? March 18, 2024
This week, The Atlantic published a new list of “The Great American Novels.” It’s full of both expected classics as well as both good and/or weird surprises. There is no way to do these lists without the former and no point in doing them without the ...
AI Keeps Getting Better March 14, 2024
A scientific asymmetry is when one field of science radically outstrips another in terms of their comparative development. Consider 1858, the year before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species; at the time, biology lay in what was effectively a pre-paradi...
A Novelist of Privileged Youth Finds a New Subject March 08, 2024
In his book “The Interpretation of Cultures,” from 1973, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued for the value of an ethnographic method he called “thick description.” Geertz believed that culture was not a “power, something to which social events,...
Can You Change What You Crave? March 08, 2024
Marco Leyton, PhD, assures me the cocaine he purchased was legal. Plus, it wasn’t for him. Definitely not. It was for recreational cocaine users who had answered Leyton’s ad in a local newspaper to do drugs and collect 500 Canadian dollars — for scie...
The Sweet Science and the Sovereign Fund March 07, 2024
For decades, professional boxing in America existed primarily as a property of premium cable. To watch the top fighters in the world swap left hooks required not only taking out a cable package but also plunking down an extra $10 to $16 for a subscri...
"American Spirit or Great Awokening?" by Bruce D. Abramson March 04, 2024
America is suffering from a deep spiritual crisis. The national polarization that so many miscast as political is really a conflict between two spiritual solutions pointing in drastically different directions. One is Wokeism, a new religion that spea...
