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AddSamples collected from asteroid Ryugu contain the four genetic “letters” of DNA, reinforcing the hypothesis that the chemical origins of life were present when…
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Five Italian divers died in a cave at 55 m. Before anyone delivers a verdict, here are the questions Just Culture demands we ask first — and why their sequence matters.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • HUGO AWARD FINALIST • In this poignant, heartfelt novella from the New York Times bestselling author of Spinning Silver...
Seven years after his explosive HBO doc, Dan Reed watches Hollywood cash in on a man he calls 'worse than Jeffrey Epstein.'
I work in a sector that speaks out on racism and human rights, yet on this issue I have felt the boundaries of acceptable speech narrow around me
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…
If you asked me today, and if you'd asked me two years ago, I'd tell you I'm very fond of my house. It's nothing special. It's a townhouse surrounded by other townhouses that look just like it, forming a semicircle of beige brick at the end of a street. There's no garden, because when I
Why aren't the Greens offering a stronger challenge to the political establishment?
Mismanagement and political campaigning have sucked the joy out of an event meant to bring people together
On war and what we have to choke down.
This week (and probably next) I want to talk a bit more Tolkien, but in a somewhat different vein from normal. Rather than discussing the historicity of Tolkien's world or adaptations of it, I want to take a moment to discuss some of the themes of Tolkien's work, which express themselves in the metaphysical architecture…
The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the...
Despite years of debate and follow-up studies, an odd streak of cosmic light still defies a final explanation. Is it a giant black hole screaming through intergalactic space?
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.