Blog Archive

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about calls to bring US-based scientists to Europe and other countries, given the US regime’s sabotage of American scientific research, both in universities and federal agencies.

I’m a creature of cultural journalism. I read it; I write it; I buy it; I read aloud juicy bits to my kids. And so I want it to live.

This is something I wrote in the middle Obama years and recently pulled from the vault. Back then, the cloud wasn't a thing, so backing up to the cloud wasn't as easy as it is now. You don't hear many people mourning lost data in crashed hard drives like we used to.

On my recent trip to the US, I brought a copy of Frank Kermode’s majestic The Sense of an Ending in my suitcase, over-optimistically planning to write about models of the end of the self, the end of the world, and how they relate to Bye Bye I Love You.

There’s been some discussion online about how European countries should recruit frustrated and/or fired American scientists who were federal employees or who worked in American universities. I have some thoughts about this at a systems level. Tl;dr:

This article first appeared online in the Atlantic on January 16, 2018 and quickly became one of the most read articles in the magazine for a week, surpassing even an argument for why Donald Trump should be impeached. Eventually it would gather over a million online views. Since it hides now behind a paywall on the Atlantic's website, I'm putting it up here.