The Greatest and Most Terrible Marketing Ploy In History, or Kubrick-loving aliens? Two Kinds of Aliens There are two kinds of aliens in this world: those who have done their homework, and those who haven’t. In the latter category you’ve got your sentient clouds, your colors from space, your discs that hover just on the edge of sight. Boring stuff. …

Use the power of rhetoric to irritate your loved ones! The most frustrating thing about arguing with an unreasonable person is that you can’t use reason to win. Be reasonable! …or not. When you can’t use reason in an argument, what the hell are you supposed to do? Well, you can always berate your opponent: attack their character, issue a witty insult that will…

The Following Is an Anti-Commencement Speech Teleology: (noun) the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. A Handy Old Greek Term Until May, I taught English at a mid-sized university in the Southwest. Every semester when midterm exams rolled around, I used to…

Today I bought a bottle of wine, a gilt cup, a pretty blue ceramic mug, some kind of Italian pumpkin spice bread in a little paper box with a tassel on top, a box of kimchi-flavored instant ramen, a square of chocolate and a tea towel. That’s right. I went…

Donald Trump destroys a landscape The border wall interrupts wildlife, endangers species, threatens ecosystems, wastes billions, kills people, and insults humanity. The History Walls are wearisome symbols. As objective-correlatives for political situations they are worn down, and would seem to be a relic of the 20th century; one thinks of the Berlin Wall, the Israel/Palestine wall, the…

The Idea In 2018, I started making my own toothpaste. I would get a mixing bowl and a whisk from the kitchen, fetch some Sharpie-inscribed bags of white powders from the lab in my garage, and mix until I had a paste. Between each batch, I’d tweak the formula. A little more…

Okay, first thing’s first. Masks work.¹ Now that we have that out of the way, do you want to know what it’s like being a retail worker during a pandemic? Why wouldn’t you, right? …

There are a few claimants to the title of “oldest city on Earth.” Beirut, by any measure, is one of them. A New York Times article from 1997 entitled “Under Beirut’s Rubble, Remnants of 5,000 Years of Civilization” describes excavation sites opened up by destruction during the Lebanese Civil War…

OUR FIRST PRESIDENT WAS A HUMAN TRAFFICKER — “How strange it is that anybody should believe any human being could be a slave, and yet be contented! … When they are alone by themselves, all their talk is about liberty — liberty! …