I see Al Gore’s been at the sauce again. Former vice president Al Gore recently compared climate change doubters to racists. Gore, speaking with former advertising executive and Climate Reality Project collaborator Alex Bogusky on a UStream interview this past week, said one day climate ...

Ah, reality! That mysterious, untouchable world of mass and energy, of gravity and fire, of genes and synapses. It lurks out of sight beyond our reach, knowable to us only by the occasional fragments that impinge on our senses—fragments that are then, after much error-introducing data compression ...

I quipped in a column here a few months ago that the Pacific island nation of Niue may be the world’s first country to be completely emptied out by emigration. As you were. I have a new candidate for the title: Somalia. Its current population is listed as 9.3 million, but it seems to me that ...

Let’s take it as a given that we’re heading into an age of austerity. This may not be the case. There is no certainty in human affairs. The secret of tabletop fusion power may be discovered next week; the geneticists may come up with something that abolishes both disease and old age, ...

Sometimes you write a column just so you can forever after refer people to it. “Oh, that subject/point/complaint/theory/argument? I tackled/countered/responded to/exploded/demolished that back in July ’11—here’s the link.” Well, this is one of those. Back in—heaven help me!—1999 I ...

I have argued elsewhere that at the age of twenty the normal human being’s development is pretty much finished. He is “cooked all through,” as it were. Not that we can’t learn, adapt, and change after that age, but our deep outlook, our worldview’s bedrock contours, are set. The rest is ...

Pretty much everything any politician says about education makes me want to go up to whoever said it, grab him by the suit-jacket lapels, and shake him forcefully up and down while screaming in his face: “DON’T YOU GET IT? YOU’RE AN INTELLIGENT GUY—WHY CAN’T YOU SEE WHAT’S RIGHT IN ...

The man in the Apple store lied to me. He LIED TO ME. But then, I knew he would. I hate the Apple Store. My kids, of course, love it. The stuff in there is so sleek, so stylish, so…so…expensive. The kids know how Apple stuff works, too, even though our home computers are all Intel. I ...

Americans are nice people. We are generous and open-hearted. Our nation is big and lush, and most of it is empty. (Our mean population density of 83 per square mile ranks us number 179 out of 240 on this list. Ireland is twice as dense; Turkey, three times; Bangladesh, thirty-five times.) The most ...

There seems to have been a lot of rioting recently. The Greeks are rioting over government spending cuts. Hockey fans rioted in Canada’s nicest city. Soccer fans staged a riot in Argentina. And…uh-oh, what’s this? Riots all over the USA: in Washington, DC, in Peoria, IL, in ...