Posts:
By Matthew Crawford When I was small, my father would conduct experiments around the house. When you blow across the top of a wine bottle, how many modes of vibration are there? How do you get the higher notes? Another time, the matter under investigation might be the...
By Glenn Greenwald U.S. and E.U. governments are expressing outrage over the forced landing by Belarus of a passenger jet flying over its airspace on its way to Lithuania. The Ryanair commercial jet, which took off from Athens and was carrying 171 passengers, was just...
By Jeffrey Tucker Twenty years ago, I had some vague sense that there was a Centers for Disease Control that performed traditional public-health functions. It tracked diseases. It made health recommendations. It served as a clearinghouse for data and information on a...
By David Leonhardt I want to end this week by showing you two Covid-19 charts. They contain the same message: The pandemic is in retreat. In the United States, there is now an excellent chance that the retreat is permanent. Victory over Covid has not yet arrived, but...
By Shannon Bond Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about Covid-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. "The 'Disinformation Dozen' produce 65% of the shares of...
By Matt Taibbi Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America’s...
By German Lopez America’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout has dwindled in recent weeks, plummeting from a previous high of nearly 3.4 million doses administered a day, on average, in mid-April to around 2.2 million a day this week. The best analogy I’ve heard to explain the...
By Kaylee McGhee White A well-respected science writer has published a thoughtful and convincing piece this week that helps confirm what most people with common sense have long believed: Covid-19 wasn’t just randomly discovered in a Chinese wet market; it escaped from...
By Minda Zetlin Malcolm Gladwell believes that the post-Covid world will be a much better and more hopeful place than it was before the pandemic. He explained his reasoning in a thought-provoking talk at last month's virtual Adobe Summit. Gladwell is best known for...
By Mac Margolis When Colombians voted in a 42-year-old development wonk as president in 2018, they knew it was a leap of faith. But what Ivan Duque lacked in political adroitness (he’d served a single term as a senator), the argument went, he would finesse as an...
The trouble with using a word as a catchall insult is that it loses its force. If everyone is a racist, then no one is. If U.S. Sens. John McCain and Mitt Romney were extremists, what was former President Donald Trump? It works both ways. Just as “fascist” and “Nazi”...
By Nicholas Goldberg To hear some people tell it, vaccine passports are just another effort by Democrats, progressives and Satan to take away your freedom, just like when they told you to wear a mask and made you shut down your business. In a hyperventilating Wall...
By Roger Cohen Three French lockdowns, and counting, over the past 13 months have been many things, among them a rare opportunity for the formidable national bureaucracy of about 5.6 million public servants to display their gift for the complication of lives. With the...
By Dan Gelernter If you’re in a high-risk group and you’d like to get the vaccine, go right ahead. I’m not a doctor and I have no wish to advise anyone in the matter — but, equally, I resent people throwing unsolicited advice at me. I am not in a high-risk group. I’m...
By Jeff Van Pelt Mark Twain said, “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.” Some people must not have gotten that breeding. Trolling on Facebook, and in the comments section of various online...
By Sean Illing America’s commitment to free speech is uniquely radical. The US Constitution treats freedom of expression as the master freedom that makes every other possible. And our legal system reflects this view, which is why it has always been incredibly...
By David Leonhardt Guido Calabresi, a federal judge and Yale law professor, invented a little fable that he has been telling law students for more than three decades. He tells the students to imagine a god coming forth to offer society a wondrous invention that would...
By Medea Benjamin Ecuador's April 11 election that led to a 5-point victory by conservative banker Guillermo Lasso over progressive candidate Andrés Arauz was not what it appeared to be. On the surface, it was a surprisingly clean and professional election, as our...
By Bruce Wilson This is just my experience and my opinions so take them as that. Just read and contemplate it. I've had a feeling for a long time that the pandemic had mostly petered out. In September 2020 in Machala, I asked the front door guards at the mall and a...
For all the prophecies of doom about the outcome of Sunday’s election, the changes that will follow are likely to be relatively minor no matter who wins. Most of the dire forecasts come from right-wing and centrist editorialists and commentators. At their most...
