Slate posted this long list and several sidebar articles/interviews on Wednesday. (I’m guessing they compiled it a while back and waited for a relatively slow news day to post it.)
Slate, Dan Kois, 20 July 2022: The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time
Subtitle: “The most tearjerking, hilarious, satisfying, and shocking death scenes in 2,500 years of culture.”
Here is something that honest journalists (and scientists) understand and do, but which conservatives and the religious never do: admit they were wrong, and change their minds. That’s intellectual honesty.
Today’s NYT has a set of eight essays by its regular columnists explaining what they were wrong about, why, and how they’ve revised their opinions.
The motivations of those who think most harshly of abortion, homosexuality, transsexuals, and so on, are enacting the harshest strategies for species survival and growth of a process they don’t believe in: evolution. Happiness and well-being of actual living individual human beings have nothing to do with it.
Two items today by Adam Lee.
OnlySky, Adam Lee, 17 Jul 2022: How to tell if you’re in a bubble
OnlySky, Adam Lee, 19 July 2022: My humanism comes from the stars
NYT, 16 Jul 2022: Putin Aims to Shape a New Generation of Supporters, Through Schools, subtitled, “Sweeping changes in the curriculum will soon cast the Russian president as a pivotal historical figure and mark an end of openness to the West.”
Print title (front page of Sunday’s paper): “Putin’s Mission to Indoctrinate Schoolchildren”
The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert, January 3 & 10, 2022 issue: How Politics Got So Polarized
Subtitled: “In a new era of hyperpartisan identities, can anything bring ‘us’ and ‘them’ together?”
Washington Post, Joel Achenbach and Aaron Steckelberg, 15 Jul 2022: Take a cosmic tour inside the images captured by NASA’s Webb telescope
Here’s an excellent interactive guide to the images released this week from the James Webb Space Telescope, highlighting significant aspects of each image. One thing I’d overlooked until now: the deep field photo (shown above in a screen capture from this piece), not only shows distortions due to gravitation lensing of distant galaxies, it even show *mirror images* of a single galaxy as its light has been bent around either side of a closer object.
Pretty much every year I status my ongoing projects — in particular sfadb.com, and my personal and family history here on this blog — and think, this year for sure! And every year I do make some progress, but even after all these years — about a decade for both — I’m still not done. Still, I think I’m closing in. This past year I’ve had the added incentive of worry about health issues. I’ve dodged the bullet twice (in both cases because I had someone here at home to call 911 or take me to the hospital), but can’t expect to live forever.
Red States and Abortion Bans; Religious Nuttery; How Fox News fakes it; Conservatives attempts to turn back the cultural clock; What Proud Boys and their wives want
Two topics today. About the James Webb Telescope photos; and about why people feel the world is broken.
I chimed in on Facebook on Monday with a link to this image, as many of my Fb friends were doing, only to put a well-known science fictional title over it: the name of a short story collection by Brian W. Aldiss, first published in 1960.
