I’ve recently returned from the heartland, and I have one thing to report. Middle Americans are fat. Hugely, jeans-bustingly, roly-poly fat. The Bible Belt has busted its buckle.
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Will Bobos ever see scientific truth?
Is scientific knowledge true? Or is it just one more made-up story of the world, with no greater claim on truth than any other?
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The third culture
Kevin Kelly is executive editor of Wired magazine, the ultra-hip organ of the computer generation, known for its screaming graphics and esoteric nerd-speak.
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The guiding lights
A colleague, a teacher of Spanish, asked about the origin of the word “septentrion,” which in both English and Spanish means “the north.”
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Groundhog Day: All sun and games
Elsewhere in the news this morning you will read or hear about Punxsutawney Phil, the famous Pennsylvania groundhog that did or did not see its shadow when it emerged from its burrow yesterday.
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Prime time isn’t ready for real science
Nobel prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman wants to bring science to prime time television.
A Sudanese combatant in 2011 • Photo by Steve Evans (CC BY 2.0)
A higher kind of growing up
Nine years ago, to escape the terror and unrest of their war-torn homeland, 10,000 boys of the Dinka tribe of southern Sudan began an unaccompanied trek that would take them hundreds of miles into Ethiopia, back to Sudan, and finally to a refugee camp in Kenya.
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Who’s winning culture war? Who cares
Thirty-five years ago [in 1959], C.P. Snow, in a now famous essay, wrote about a polarization of academics into two camps: literary intellectuals and scientists. Not only did the two groups not understand each other, said Snow, they worked at cross purposes.
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Getting cross with wired
Q. What’s Wired? A. That’s easy. Wired is a hot new magazine for technotrendies.
US fighter jets flying over Kuwait • US Department of Defense (Public Domain)
Delusions of techno-wizardry
Mary Kingsley, intrepid Victorian traveler, was one of the most adventurous of 19th century European explorers of Africa. Untypical of Victorian women, she went where men feared to go. She was also untypical in her sensitive appreciation of African culture and thought. But even she never doubted the racial preeminence of Europeans.