I’m still brooding over the Connecticut massacre. Here are some points I’d like to add to those I raised in my column on Friday: One respondent to my previous post chided me for my inflammatory language. Yes, my response was emotional, because I literally get sick thinking about what the hard-core gun-rights folks—and their appeasers–have [...]

It’s happened again: a lone gunman has carried out a massacre, this time in an elementary school in Newtown, CT. A young man killed 18 children and eight adults, reportedly including his mother, a teacher at the school, before taking his own life. And so once again I’m dragging out my plea for gun control, [...]

I’m pondering complexity again. The proximate cause is the December 11 launch at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, of a Center for Complex Systems & Enterprises. The center’s goal is “to enable deep understanding of complexity and create innovative approaches to managing complexity.” This rhetoric reminds me of the Santa Fe Institute, a hotbed [...]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb can be a pain in the ass. After I invited him to speak at Stevens Institute of Technology a year ago, he made all kinds of demands about where, when and how the event should take place and be publicized—or rather, not publicized. He loathes journalists so much that he almost backed [...]

Is heaven real? Eben Alexander thinks so. He is a neurosurgeon who learned his craft at Duke and honed it at Harvard. In 2008 he fell into a coma, his brain infected by bacterial meningitis. He emerged from the coma with memories of a fantastical adventure, during which he rode on a butterfly beside an [...]

The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding over recent scientific portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes. When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the “first Thanksgiving,” in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast [...]

I’m teaching Darwin again this semester, in two separate courses, and I’m confronted with a familiar dilemma: How should I respond to students who reject evolutionary theory on religious grounds? One course is a freshman survey of the humanities and social sciences, and the other reviews the history of science and technology. I asked both [...]

Over the past two days, The New York Times published a two-part essay titled “Rethinking the ‘Just War,’” by philosopher Jeff McMahan of Rutgers. I got excited when I spotted the headline on the Times website yesterday. I’ve wrestled with war’s morality—or lack thereof—since I was a kid. I tried to exorcise my obsession by [...]

In 2005, I became, briefly, a tool of the military-industrial complex. My service began when I received an email from Centra Technology, a defense contractor. Centra wanted my ideas on fighting terrorism, which it would pass on to the National Counterrorism Center, a security agency overseen by the CIA. My first reaction was, Whaaa..? After [...]

I’ve been trying to come up with something to say about Sandy that hasn’t already been asserted and questioned and reasserted and so on. So I thought I’d talk about how nuclear plants weathered the storm. As I mentioned in a previous post, environmentalists in my hometown and throughout New York want to permanently close [...]