by Akim Reinhardt
I’ve always found the notion of a handful of Swedes deciding the world’s best anything to be ludicrous, even laughable. Well, not always. When I was a kid, a teenager, I thought the Nobel Prizes must be important and mean something. But by my twenties, they had started to seem like a joke.
Nothing against Sweden or its fine denizens, of course. A lot of us would probably very much enjoy living there. But that’s precisely because it’s hard to think of a country less representative of the global human experience. Almost any other country you could name is a truer sampling of the global human experience than this one, with its roughly 0.1% of humanity perched near the top of the world.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s different in the sciences. Maybe in that realm a Nobel Prize signifies something other than an ego trip and a fat check. I’m no scientist. I don’t even really understand how gravity works; if you told me it’s because there’s some big ‘ole magnet at the center of the Earth holding us down, I’d probably muse: “Huh, should probably get a little more iron in my diet.”
How ‘bout that. Turns out there is a big ‘ole magnet at the center of the Earth. Pass the brocolli.
Maybe Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was just kidding when in his memoir he named a chapter about the Nobel Prize in Physics: “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake” (his invention of dynamite being the other). Perhaps in the sciences the Nobel is a meaningful brand of lifetime achievement award for worthy scientists who have made important contributions to our understanding and applications of physics, chemistry and biology/medicine. But not geology, oceanography, mathematics, or a bunch of other sciences. Cause fuck those branches of science?
I don’t know. At least they’re not handing out Nobels to the social sciences. How ridiculous would that be?
Oh wait. They are. But not. Kinda. It’s confusing. Read more »
Art is dangerous. It’s time people remembered that and recognized the fullness of it. For if art is to remain important or even relevant in the current moment, then it’s long past time artists stopped flashing dull claws and pretending they had what it takes to slice through ignorance. We need them swallow their feel-good clichés and to begin sharpening their blades. We need dangerous art, and we cannot afford much more art that its creators believe is dangerous when it is not.
Last spring, American documentary film maker Ken Burns gave a commencement address at Brandeis University in Boston. Burns is a talented speaker, adept at spinning uplifting yarns, and 
Are you savvy?
Some people use religion to get their life together. Good for them. I’m all for it. Although I myself am an atheist, I don’t think it much matters how someone gets their life together so long as they do.
Historians have spilled much ink analyzing and interpreting all of the U.S. presidential elections, dating back to George Washington’s first go in 1788. But a handful of contests get more attention than others. Some elections, besides being important for all the usual reasons, also provide insights into their eras’ zeitgeist, and proved to be tremendously influential far beyond the four years they were intended to frame.
There are only four U.S. states where white people are 
The turn of the 21st century saw a burst of atheistic declarations and critiques in the United States and Great Britain, led by a small group of celebrity atheists including Philosopher Daniel Dennett, Biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist Christopher Hitchens. I have always found this New Atheism, as the movement is often called, to be a mixed bag. It was long overdue, and many good (if obvious) points were made. However, there was also a fair bit of navel-gazing and even stupidity. And among some of the celebrity leaders, I believe, there was also a profound misunderstanding of religion, how it functions, and even its basic purposes.
Two spaces after a period, not one. If a topic sentence leading to a paragraph can get a whole new line and an indentation, then other new sentences can get an extra space. Don’t smush sentences together like puppies in a cardboard box at a WalMart parking lot. Let them breathe. Show them some affection. Teach them to shit outside.
The barbarians have won.
A little over a year ago I published 
What do we know about vampires?
I teach at a large, public university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. For about a decade now, the upper administration has had a habit of sending “comforting” emails whenever there’s a major school shooting. Of course there are far too many school shootings in America to send a note for each one, so I suppose the administration tries to keep it “relevant,” for lack of a better word. These heartfelt missives arrive in my Inbox once or twice a year, typically after some lunatic shoots up a college campus. So far as I can tell, they go to everyone. To every faculty member, staff member, and student on campus. To 25,000 people or more.
I am sitting on the couch of our discontent. The Robot Overlords™ are circling. Shall we fight them, as would a sassy little girl and her aging, unshaven action star caretaker in the Hollywood rendition of our feel good dystopian future? Shall we clamp our hands over our ears, shut our eyes, and yell “Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah!”? Shall we bow down and let the late stage digital revolution wash over us, quietly and obediently resigning ourselves to all that comes next, whether or not includes us?
You don’t have to fuck me. Or give me any money. You don’t have to shave your head or adopt a peculiar diet or wear an ugly smock or come live in my compound among fellow cult members. You don’t even have to believe in anything.
