William Shatner was excited to go to space last year. He didn't realize he'd be overwhelmed with sadness and go through "the strongest feelings of grief" that he'd ever experienced.

Hey folks! I am working on finishing up some things this week, so I thought I would post the text of the keynote I gave at the Prancing Pony Podcast Moot earlier this December. I've made some minor edits to conform a bit more to the form of a blog post, but this remains very…

The violent response to an attempted murder would have happened regardless of Musk, Lee Hurley writes.

A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.

In 2013, education reformers tried to help poor students the using the best tool at their disposal: The 16th most popular Ted Talk.Special thanks to Marcus Credé! Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSo...

Why did Joan Didion love Barry Goldwater but hate Ronald Reagan? Historian Sam Tanenhaus helps make sense of Didion's conservatism.

World War II has faded into movies, anecdotes, and archives that nobody cares about anymore. Are we finally losing the war?

This blog post takes us back to 2010, retracing and incident where a statistical anomaly led to the discovery of a subtle flaw in the way we were using a security-critical library.

A blog series in which I reread LOTR 50 years after I first read it, age 10, over the winter of 1975-76. Pippin and Merry come as a double act (not exactly ‘dumb and dumber’, but not a million miles from that either) in the Jackson film version of LOTR, providing both light relief and…

With peptides like BPC-157, we are seeing 'the wholesale substitution of consumer enthusiasm for clinical evidence.'

Seven years after his explosive HBO doc, Dan Reed watches Hollywood cash in on a man he calls 'worse than Jeffrey Epstein.'

Official website of author Karen E. Bender

On irony poisoning and the importance of being earnest.