Steve Gimbel is a Professor of Philosophy and the former Edwin T. and Cynthia Shearer Johnson Chair for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Gettysburg College, holding a Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University. He is author of ten books including Isn't that Clever: A Philosophy of Humor and Comedy (Routledge), Einstein: His Space and Times (Yale), Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion (Johns Hopkins), Exploring the Scientific Method (Chicago), and Defending Einstein: Hans Reichenbach's Early Writings on Space, Time, and Motion (Cambridge). He has four lecture series in the Teaching Company's Great Courses: Redefining Reality: Intellectual Implications of Modern Science, Formal Logic, Take My Course...Please: The Philosophy of Humor, and The Great Questions of Philosophy and Physics. He is a frequent contributor with Gwydion Suilebhan to Salon where they write on comedy. Gwydion Suilebhan is the Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and the Project Director of the New Play Exchange. With Steven Gimbel, he writes about comedy and culture for Salon, with recent profiles of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Ivan Reitman, Bob Saget, Ed Asner, and Jackie Mason, among others. A founding member of The Welders, a Helen Hayes Award-winning playwrights collective in DC, Suilebhan is the author of several plays, including The Butcher, Reals, Abstract Nude, Let X, The Faithkiller, and the Helen Hayes Award-nominated Transmission. His work has been produced by Centerstage, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Gulfshore Playhouse, and Theater J. He is also the author of Anthem, a short film directed by Hal Hartley. Email addresses: sgimbel@gettysburg.edu and suilebhan@gmail.com
by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan For the last several years, elected Republicans, full of anti-trans zeal, have challenged their opponents to define the word “woman.” They aren’t really curious. They’re setting a rhetorical trap. They’re taking a word that seems to have a simple meaning, because the majority of people who identify as women…
by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan This year marks the 42nd anniversary of the American release of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams’ “five-book trilogy,” of which Hitchhiker’s was the first installment, led readers through a melancholy universe in which bureaucracy is the ultimate source of evil and shallow, self-serving incompetents are the…
by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan At a recent tournament sponsored by the St. Louis Chess Club, 19-year old Hans Niemann rocked the chess world by defeating grandmaster Magnus Carlson, the world’s top player. Their match was not an anticipated showdown between a senior titan and a recognized rising phenom. The upset came out of…
by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan As the January 6th hearings continue and Americans watch new, seemingly undeniable video evidence of insurrection and quibble about whether one could reach the steering wheel of the Presidential SUV from the back seat, the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and historian of science who coined the phrase…
by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan Kurt Gödel, one of the most important logicians of the 20th century, is best known for his incompleteness theorem, which proves that any attempt to formulate a logical basis for arithmetic will either be unsound or incomplete. He was also famous for being a strange egg: walking around in…