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If Flannery O’Connor somehow birthed the love child of Sid Vicious, she might end up sounding like novelist Nell Zink. Equal parts Southern Gothic’s grotesquely twisted charm and punk and alternative music’s insiderish anti-establishmentism, Zink’s second novel Mislaid will disorient you until you let it delight you. Zink’s mix — which I’ll call Southern Gothic Punk — might be an acquired taste, but a taste well worth experiencing if only to break out of the contemporary rut of MFA-programed, sound-alike fiction that’s become the bubblegum pop of today’s literature.
Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Deny Evolution If adults want to deny evolution, sure. That’s fine. Whatever. But those adults better not make their kids follow in […]
We’ve only ever seen 2nd-generation stars and later. Until, just maybe, now. “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” […]
There’s a chance the Earth will turn green, and even though there’s no such thing as a green star, perhaps someday, the Sun will, too. “‘You are a different kind […]
Why “letting there be light” in the Universe isn’t enough. “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” –Marcus Aurelius I want you […]
How we’re still, only now, just discovering the closest stars to Earth. “As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I’m not sure that I ever could, but […]
After the CMB, before the first stars, there was nothing to see. Or was there? “[I]f there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we […]
We claim to know the Universe’s history to incredible precision. But is this justified? “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”-Albert Einstein We’ve reached […]
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,” begins James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, opening a torrent of words that has drowned many readers in confusion […]
The Sun is made almost entirely out of hydrogen and helium; the Earth has hardly any of either. How’d that happen? “The single most powerful element of youth is our […]
Despite it’s reputation as an “infinite range” force, the realities of our Universe place a limit on its reach. “In my dreams and visions, I seemed to see a line, […]
It’s been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, but our observable Universe is much bigger than just 13.8 billion light years! Image credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, […]
Edinburgh is the “grey metropolis in the North.” It has been for centuries, and thanks to Unesco, the capital of Scotland will keep its dour exterior for the foreseeable future. […]
How to turn the greatest NASA images in history into wallpaper, curtains, fabric and more! Image credit: Elinor Medezinski, Suprime-Cam/Subaru Telescope; ZwCl 0024–17. “I’m coming back in… and it’s the […]
Supermoons are both super and common, but they’re only a tiny slice of our nearest neighbor’s magnificent journey. Image credit: ESA / NASA and the International Space Station. “O, swear […]
With a planetary nebula, over 80,000 stars and a distance of only 10,000 light-years, it’s one of the most rewarding globulars of all! Image credit: R. Columbari, via http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=31833. “I […]
The incredible story of a single simple atom, that just happens to be in your body right now! Image credit: Richard Crisp, via http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/incoming/horse_ap155edf_pl39k_lrgb_15hrs.jpg. “The atoms come into my brain, […]
There’s a supermassive black hole at the center of almost all of them, but who came first? “One has to be an optimist; one has to hope that somewhere there’ll be […]
Summer is coming, and with it, the most famous nebula in the night sky. “The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, […]
It’s the most fantastic idea ever bandied about: that there are an infinite number of Universes identical to our own out there, and that everything that could have possibly happened […]
Editor’s Note: I recently read and subsequently tweeted about Submergence, the new novel by J.M. Ledgard. Then I asked one of the smartest people I know – Brian O’Neill – […]
The feeling of certainty might be our default setting. We spend most of our mental life confirming our opinions, even when those opinions involve complex issues. We believe we understand […]
It was this map of Greenland that triggered this post. I say map, but I mean hole in a drainpipe. This picture was sent in by Ruland Kolen, who was […]
Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts.
Fellow pseudonymous neuroblogger Neuroskeptic(to whom I owe a great deal in inspiration) has published a fantastic piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ($) on the benefits to science of anonymity. Last November Neuroskeptic became […]
Kids do the darnedest things. For instance, one time late at night, when I was 9 or 10, I opened the drawer in the kitchen, took out the biggest knife, […]
One consequence of mass killings like this week’s horror in Newtown, according to reporting by Kristina Fiore, is this: Involuntary commitments of mentally ill men will increase for a while. […]
One of cartography’s most persistent myths: mapmakers of yore, frustrated by the world beyond their ken, marked the blank spaces on their maps with the legend Here be monsters. It’s […]
Rather than admiring from afar the protesters in India, and congratulating the national leaders who have begun to address sexual violence in the U.S. military, we need to confront the broader problem of misogyny in American legal culture.