End-of-year retrospectives are so over done! Let’s talk about how life has changed since 2000. And then to really make it exciting, I’ll give my predictions for what life will be like in 2021. We’ll start with an obvious one. 1. Flying became a bigger pain in the ass. I.e., the terrorists won... »
With even a casually critical reading of the news, it becomes painfully clear that politicians are by and large a bunch of lying liars. They all lie, across the political spectrum, regularly traversing the lie taxonomy, from exaggerations, misleading statements, and lies by omission, to outright fabrications and even occasionally going for the Big Lie... »
Nominology is my neologism for the study of naming things. I’m that good at it! Or at least I think I know good names when I see them. To some extent this is obvious. Ideally you want a name that’s unique, evocative, and not unwieldy. But I’d like to break those desiderata down and suggest... »
In the late 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most famous — and perhaps one of the most misinterpreted — experiments in the social sciences. He enlisted volunteers from far off lands (Kansas and Nebraska, in his case) to route a package to one of two target individuals in Massachusetts: a stockbroker in... »
Prescript: This article is by popular demand, having won our meta poll at the beginning of the year. I predict three categories of reactions to it: (1) This is obvious. (2) This is obviously wrong. (3) This is just the rationalization I needed to keep doing what I’m doing! If there’s a fourth category... »
