The photographer who snapped the photos of the Artemis II crew’s return to Earth spent years honing his craft on a Navy aircraft carrier.

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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.

Official website of author Karen E. Bender

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…

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

Samples collected from asteroid Ryugu contain the four genetic “letters” of DNA, reinforcing the hypothesis that the chemical origins of life were present when…

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

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

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…

Woke 2 is Woke 1 with an honest relation to power.

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

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.

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

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?

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