A new headline in the Atlantic reads, "Are colds really worse, or are we all just weak babies now?" The writer, Katherine Wu, argues that there's no evidence that colds are worse now than they were in 2019. …

Every so often, an opinion piece appears with a structure so set it might have been written by an AI. Invariably, these pieces draw the wrong conclusions. Here's what I think is wrong with these pieces and what we can learn from far-right politicians such as DeSantis. I'll take as…

Well, 2022 was interesting. It’s late in the evening, almost new year, and since this blog only has a small audience I do not feel bad oversharing how I feel. Professionally, 2022 went very well. I co-wrote a bunch of papers including a few close to my heart, such as…

“If only we had taxed the rich maybe none of this would have happened," Alexandra Ocasio Cortez tweeted. The atmosphere was solemn last night, reminiscent of the orchestra playing on the Titanic, amid mass resignations and layoffs at Twitter, and growing uncertainty about the social media giant’s future after its…

“I like to take risks. My films never follow the current trend.” “All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact recreation of it. …

Dreamy, feverish, introspective, psychoanalytic, Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is the perfect read for when you have Covid, or so I have found, and are sick in bed unable to do much else. It’s long (the edition I read, Oxford World’s Classics, is at 692 pages, average-size typesetting). This…

Frontispice of Fontenelle’s Entretiens Sur la Pluralité Des Mondes (1686) Here I summarize an influential science-popularizing book by Bernard De Fontenelle, entitled Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), in French Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. This post is based on an earlier Twitter thread that got retweeted a…

I wasn’t sure what to expect of Piranesi. I enjoyed Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a large-scope ambitious novel, and an enthralling read. I picked up Piranesi with no particular expectations, noting it is a much slimmer volume than her previous book. Anyway, Piranesi blew me away. It…

2020, it’s been quite the year. One of the minor story lines in this ongoing bizarre-fest are reports of white women academics passing themselves off as women of color. Here are some thoughts on the phenomenon. …