By Lee Vinsel

I'm reposting this essay I wrote in 2021 because the online blogging platform Medium has apparently changed its policies and people are having trouble accessing the original. Hopefully, I'll find a better, more durable solution soon. I'm reposting it unaltered, even though I would unsurprisingly do some

I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very...

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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

<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?

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

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…

The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the...

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.

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

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

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?

Why aren't the Greens offering a stronger challenge to the political establishment?

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

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.