A few weeks ago, I wrote a bit about what I’ve taken to calling “technical estrangement,” the idea that the Information Age has exposed us to a lot of technical information that was once restricted to specialists, information we have trouble interpreting. Because it looks strange and not entirely comprehensible…

May 16’s 60 Minutes report on UAPs — Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs — feels like a major blockbuster. For the first time, it seems, American pilots are going on the record with what they’ve seen, including strange things they simply cannot explain. Lue Elizondo, who spent…

Last week I ran a simple experiment on Twitter, inviting people to find a pattern in a three-number sequence. The numbers were 6–12–18. In order to solve it, people had to do two steps. First, propose their own sequence of three numbers that would conform to the pattern they thought…

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the preface Italo Calvino wrote in 1964 to his first novel, The Path to the Spider’s Nest, first published in 1947. The book is quite unlike most of what Calvino is known for; it’s far more realist, with a straight-forward narrative, and reads…

It’s always strange when one’s professional life and one’s hobbies collide. I’ve been collecting guitar effects pedals for several years, not nearly as long as I’ve been researching conspiracy theories, but I hardly expected to see the Boss MT-2 Metal Zone pedal show up in a conspiracy theory. …

“There is something noble in the love of the dead.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson I have been thinking for the past few days now about Molly Osberg’s recent piece in Jezebel, “There Is No After.” In it, Osberg describes the incalculable toll of the past year, both in terms of…

Public Displays of Grief and the Politics of Mourning Charlie Stross has a great thread on Prince Philip’s death and what it means to perform compulsory mourning for a stranger, which I recommend everyone checking out. In particular, I really appreciate the way he notes the divide between public discussions of sex versus public discussions of grief; in the…

So this is how the world is beginning again: not with a bang, but with a series of whimpers. Like everyone, I’ve been trying to imagine what will constitute whatever the “new normal” will be, and trying to figure out when it’s going to get here. What I realized I’ve…

When the drama of human life is secondary to the plot — Early in the pandemic I watched two films, one that I’d seen dozens of times before, and one new to me. David Cronenberg’s 1986 classic The Fly offers a fairly standard narrative arc: A scientist named Seth Brundle plays God and is punished. His secret invention, a teleportation machine which…