(Photo by Gordon via Flickr) In 1985, Bayer patented a synthetic insecticide that soon showed up in its garden products. Imidacloprid belonged to a new class of chemicals, neonicotinoids, neonics for short. They block neural receptors, killing an insect or, with milder exposure, causing tremors, convulsion, an inability…
I am glad my mother cannot see my house right now. First there was COVID, so why would I bother with beeswax and Swifters when the only person showing up was the mail carrier? I like Travis and value his opinion, but he is far too busy…
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) in a screenshot of C-SPAN coverage of the impeachment trial. The prosecution rested today, in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, five to six hours ahead of schedule. The Senate is adjourned until noon Eastern, Friday, when Trump’s lawyers will mount a defense, on…
he question many ask about extraterrestrial life is not if but when we will find it. Back in 1997, Carl Sagan said, “There can be little doubt that civilizations more advanced than the earth’s exist elsewhere in the universe.” Just a few years ago, Ellen Stofan, director of the National Air and Space Museum and former chief scientist for NASA, predicted that “definitive evidence” of extraterrestrial life will be found in the next two decades.
Lawyer Bruce Castor in a screenshot from ABC News coverage of the trial. The genuine emotion on the first day of the impeachment trial, today, came from US Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland’s 8th District, who is the lead manager for the second impeachment of Donald Trump. Raskin’s opening…
Photo by John Griswold When I was a kid, in the Midwest, spinach was obviously good for you because it came hygienically frozen in blocks straight from the factory and was bitter as sin in the pot. Who would ever have eaten that boiled mush if it did not…
Some books capture your imagination; "Zero Zone" locked mine in an art gallery. An adroit literary thriller, its prose has a clean, well-lit spaciousness, yet the sensory images are so rich that every page is splashed with color.
The United States is an extraordinary nation. Not an exceptional one, but an extraordinary one. It is not based on blood or history or religion. It is based on an idea, and on the rule of law. But if we do not agree on the implications of that idea or how that law should be interpreted, what are we?
Screenshot from a trailer for ‘The Dig.’ The problems for writers of historical fiction may be little different from those of anyone using “true events” as the basis of their stories. Sources may be more distant, but the real issue remains: which drama, among the welter of…
Koenig learned how to craft a sentence from the literary lions of Washington University (Gass, Elkin, Nemerov). He then became a foreign service officer, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a press agent at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He knows a lot about the gathering of information—and the spreading of disinformation.