No available metric forecasts anything but misfortune for Americans — Yes, this is going to be another doom and gloom article. Let’s just go over the facts first. News is breaking and being forgotten faster than ever. Let’s refresh our memories. Poverty is on the rise. Accordingly to the census, between 2019 and 2020, 3.3 million more Americans fell into…

Google’s recent chatbot fiasco raises a shocking possibility — You’ve probably heard about it in the news. A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine, after many hours of conversing with the company’s “breakthrough conversation technology” LaMDA, grew convinced that the chatbot AI had actually become a sentient being. …

Karahan Tepe and the overturning of every history book ever written — The most important archaeological region in the world right now is not Greece, nor Egypt, nor India, nor China, nor any other place that might first come to mind. In fact, it’s southern Turkey, long recognized as the northern tip of ancient Mesopotamia but never given the attention of the…

How human environments everywhere have decayed together — The mass movement of people from the countryside to the city was crucial to the initial success of the capitalist system. It’s a claim which needs no introduction and little elaboration. Only with a large permanent population of landless workers to sell their labor to the factories was early industrial…

When social institutions go up for sale — So Elon Musk bought Twitter and the world’s been set ablaze. But why should anybody actually care? Is Musk really a liberator carrying the flag of free speech? Or is he really an intimidating techno-villain out to buy the world? To find an answer, first we must realize that this…

The American mega-crisis is being fueled by unprecedented ineptitude from elected officials — Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, has been insider trading for years. Everyone knows. No one cares. And she’s not even alone; 59 members of Congress just this year violated the anti-insider trading STOCK Act, each getting slapped with a grand total of $200 in fines for…

How one protest folk icon’s life serves as a warning for today — Phil Ochs may be known today as just another 60s protest folk singer in a sea of other Bob Dylan copycats and would-be activists turned novelty acts. Or, to many, he may not be known at all. In his own day, though, he was a titan of the protest folk…

How English linguistic colonialism stains the legacy of sacred native spaces — The prevalence of names associated with Hell or the Devil in the natural wonders of the American landscape can come as a shock. For a country so rich in so many varieties of terrain, all containing striking scenes of natural beauty like its European colonizers had never seen before, it’s…

How archaeology confirms the exit out of Eden was commanded by God — The story of agriculture is simple and obvious. The people of the Fertile Crescent, having been hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, made the sudden revolutionary discovery of deliberately planting crops for planned harvests. …