Category: Science
“You have got to feed the biology of the soil.”
I have long been interested in the work of the Land Institute and their perennial crops, so I appreciated this story about how people are trying to use them: “Mainstream agriculture, they just don’t get it,” says Jerry Doan, standing...
“legalizing marijuana won’t solve those disparities”
I found this interview with Alex Berenson, who just wrote a new book about the dangers of marijuana, very interesting and well-balanced: TMP: In your Times op-ed, you suggest that the ominous scholarly findings have been ignored thanks to legalization advocates...
colonizing Mars won’t be nearly as exciting as we think
Micah Meadowcroft is in top form with this essay at The New Atlantis about the letdown that colonizing Mars could be: Consider your place in our interplanetary future. Let us speculate. Suppose that SpaceX or some similar enterprise has succeeded,...
where Foucault and the Apostle Paul meet
This interview with Alan Jacobs is full of all the things I love to think about! The new book has an “Interlude,” in which you point to “other pilgrims, other paths,” and one of the figures is Dorothy Day, an icon...
“Nothing can take form except within limits.”
Wendell Berry summarizes many of our contemporary problems quite well in this excellent interview with Gracy Olmstead: Those problems could be summed up as the triumph of industrialism and industrial values over the lives of living creatures, and over the...
when inadequate care kills people
This Lancet study suggests that low-quality health care is responsible for more deaths than lack of access to healthcare at all. Education is key to further developing healthcare systems — it’s why we do what we do! In low-income countries,...
everything you know about obesity is wrong — well, maybe not everything
This essay about obesity, stigma, and medical practitioners by Michael Hobbes is arresting and convicting: And the medical community’s primary response to this shift has been to blame fat people for being fat. Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing...
the ecosystems of vacant lots
Having lived around a lot of vacant lots in Baltimore and seen many that were tinkered with and then abandoned again, this story from Andrea Appleton about a researcher trying to find what grows best, absorbs toxins, and retains stormwater...
the devil in the details
Jeffrey Bilbro has an excellent essay ruminating on the question of GMOs in the New Jerusalem, inspired by Abigail Murrish’s thoughts at Christianity Today on the same. Here’s Murrish: if the New Jerusalem will have as-yet-unseen cultural diversity—the best of what...
“the joy of cryptozoology”
How can you not love an essay like this? Clare Coffey is a delight to read: That the movements of the human mind, its bent for narrative and order, might correspond to something real besides raw evolutionary fitness simply does...