Waiting Around to Die

They were among my father’s last words, uttered a few days before he died. I sat in one of the kitchen chairs next to the hospice bed set up in the den where the television... Read More
Normal Aging or Disease? The Demarcation Fades

How do you begin to write about the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease in a way that’s informative, absorbing, and, dare I say, entertaining to the reader? The only thing that comes to mind is the hilarious... Read More
The Lone Humanist One Man’s Struggle to Save Humanity By Defending the Prairie

America’s belief in climate change can be as fickle as the weather. Every time a heat wave or violent storm strikes, the polls register a rise in acceptance. Whenever it snows, every denier crows. The... Read More
Science of the Inconceivable

Imagine yourself on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and feel the natural power, pulsing through everything. The pulse is out there in the wind currents. The pulse is out there in the vast... Read More
The Human Future: Upgrade or Replacement?

A computer can be upgraded by adding memory, or a whizzier operating system—but eventually it’s time to just get a new computer. Is humanity’s fate similar? Ray Kurzweil (futurist author and Google’s director of engineering)... Read More
On Eating Animals

Some years ago in a Montana slaughterhouse, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars,... Read More
Not a Gentleman but a Scholar: Unsexing the Hallowed Halls of Academia

In “Love on Campus,” William Deresiewicz’s 2007 American Scholar piece, he made a fleeting yet apposite comment: in the popular media, professors—however moral or corrupt, sexually predatory or endearingly oversexed—are invariably male. He pointed to... Read More