On irony poisoning and the importance of being earnest.

Official website of author Karen E. Bender

<strong>Exclusive: </strong>The strange and lonely death of Bikram Lama exposes a glaring gap in homelessness services. What hopes and dreams brought him to Australia, and what went wrong?

Experts analyze why Covid severity has declined, who still benefits from booster shots, and if a once-feared virus is now more like plain old colds or flu.

NFTs, the metaverse and AI are the most recent Silicon Valley enthusiasms. Does anyone remember how to build a consumer product?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • HUGO AWARD FINALIST • In this poignant, heartfelt novella from the New York Times bestselling author of Spinning Silver...

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…

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

Like Imperial Japan before us, the United States has substituted tactical and operational planning for strategic thinking.

Artemis II astronauts updated the iconic 1968 image during their 2026 loop around the Moon.

To HIV researchers, I am an ‘elite controller’ – someone whose immune system has enabled them to live for decades without symptoms or medication. I hope that one day science will understand this tiny but lucky minority

Talkspace has amassed “one of the largest mental health data banks in the world,” according to reports to investors, containing 140 million message exchanges.

Criticism of public schools is not entirely wrong – but by ignoring unequal conditions, it misdiagnoses the problem and misplaces responsibility.

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.

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…