By Eric Le Roy
The universe was once a black hole so small that not even a microscope would have detected it. If my feeble grasp of science is right on this one, then it makes it all the more amazing when that cacophonous “Who Let the Dogs Out? moment occurred. All hell broke loose, literally and metaphorically. Night and nothingness made way for light and somethingness.
And … Read the rest
Death used to be simple. Your heart stopped, you stopped breathing, the doctor sighed, closed your eyes with two fingers, and that was it. Now we have ventilators, defibrillators, ECMO machines, organ transplantation laws, fMRI scanners and ethics committees. The border between life and death did not move; we just started to see how fuzzy it always was.
Underneath the drama there are very boring facts: cells need oxygen, neurons … Read the rest
People love big things. Big cars, big houses, big countries. Something in the human brain still worships scale, as if the mammoth that impressed our ancestors is still walking somewhere behind us. And so, many citizens will proudly point at the map and say: “Look how enormous it is — this is greatness.” They say it with the same confidence with which a smoker says his cough is “just from … Read the rest
My friend shared an article with me today, and for a minute I could almost hear the choir warming up. Not the church choir—the political one. The kind that turns diplomacy into a superhero movie, where history is an impatient editor and the messy parts get cut for runtime. The article’s own author is more careful than the headline energy around it: he says Trump’s claim to have “ended … Read the rest
