As I keep listening to The Better Angels of Our Nature, I have been fascinated by the devolution of violence, both historically and culturally. It’s a fascinating listen/read and I will again highly recommend it to anyone who has a curiosity like mine for sociological and cultural issues and trends that both explain aspects of our universe and help me understand why the world isn’t as genteel as I wish it were…or why maybe I’m…
It’s a popular myth, or at least an oversimplification, that opposable thumbs are uniquely human and separate us from other animals. That’s simply not true. Virtually all primates have opposable thumbs…chimps, gorillas, orangutans, baboons and bonobos. Many also have opposable big toes, which humans have largely lost through evolution. Bonobos are particularly interesting in this context because they’re one of our two closest living relatives (along with chimpanzees), sharing roughly 98.7% of our DNA. Their…
During my four years of high school Latin, I’m not sure I ever ran across the name “Ranunculus”. The name is derived from the Latin word “rana,” which means “frog”. The diminutive suffix “-unculus” was added to create “ranunculus,” literally meaning “little frog.” That name was given to these flowering plants because many Ranunculus species grow in moist or wet habitats where frogs are commonly found. You may have recall that our hilltop is not…
A few days ago (April Fools Day), we all saw the Artemis II rocket blast off from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. EDT. It was the first crewed mission toward the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, carrying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Victor Glover, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the Moon. I don’t know about you, but it sure…
Towards the end of listening to 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, he references Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I’ve heard of Pinker’s book, but never read it and there was an upcoming opening on my Audible dance card, so I downloaded the book and have started listening to it. Notably, Pinker wrote the book in 2011, fifteen years ago. In it, he argues that, despite widespread perception to…
For a while now I have been noticing the new emergency room series called The Pitt (a play on Pittsburgh, the high intensity and grit, and the fact that ER’s are on the lower level of hospitals) on my Hulu feed. Then my trainer, who is a grad student in kinesiology working towards his Physical Therapy certification, told me I had to watch it, so I did. I loved it. It was incredibly realistic, perhaps…
When I think of the world’s ills, social media goes right to the top of the list. That’s actually a pretty startling thing to say given what’s happening across the world at the moment. The truly existential and long-term risks to the world should start with climate change and the documented, slow-moving crisis that it portends. The physical consequences like rising seas, intensifying storms, prolonged droughts, ecosystem collapse, and mass displacement are already underway and…
When the term “tribal warfare” has come up, I have always thought of Africa for some reason. When I was traveling to subsaharan Africa almost forty years ago, I was surprised to learn about how much inter-tribe rivalry existed and what a storied history and debate there was about how prevalent it was in the context particularly of a continent beset with a turbulent colonial past and then as a source of the Western Hemisphere’s…
For many years now, when I’ve gone on motorcycle rides that included my friend Frank O’Connell, I would hear about this little toy company that he was involved with. Frank is a marketing guru of significant renown and he also has a connection to the toy business from years ago when he worked for Mattel on the Intelevision product. I know this for two reasons, the first of which is that it’s what business friends…
A few weeks ago and for no particular reason, I downloaded onto my Audible app, a copy of Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), one of America’s greatest writers and humorists. Born in Missouri, he grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi River, a setting that would define his most famous work, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry…