After three years, space politicization continues


Rare is a thing so unknowable as to provide infinite wonder. In a simpler age, the night sky might have been such a thing. It sure isn’t now. Last Monday marked the three-year anniversary of one of the saddest days in recent memory: Pluto’s demotion to dwarf-planet status. Years of watching Ms. Frizzle and her […]

Kenyan census is not a cure-all


The term “ethnic violence” is used so often in relation to African tribal disputes that it is easy to forget to ask exactly what that term means. For Rwandans, it meant that relations between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes became so bad that genocide followed. The same can be said today for tribes in the […]

Cankles: the biggest threat since swine flu


There were a lot of things to worry about this summer, for the anxiety-prone. A recessed economy, a miserable job market, the persistent recurrence of swine flu cases and the death of our nation’s most beloved crazy person made lounging on the global warming-heated beach almost stressful. As though worrying about whether the cabana boy […]

Reality TV viewers perpetuate broken ideals


We, the public, demand a lot from our Hollywood stars. We’ve certainly had our way with the buxom blonde songstresses and ditzy heiresses, and we’ve preyed unremittingly on the clean-cut, sexually-curious boy banders, A-list couples in hiding and, of course, the young, physically abusive R&B entertainers. But somewhere on this path of unreasonable privacy invasion, […]