Full story »

So, it appears campaign season is under way in earnest. Mr. Obama officially kicked off the festivities in Virginia and Ohio yesterday, and we saw our first Mitt-scorcher on Denver TV a couple days ago. I’ve been thinking about the Obama administration’s performance to date for a few months, and perhaps now is as good a time as any to summarize what I think has been the dominant theme of his presidency.

My home state, North Carolina, has a wonderful motto: esse quam videri – to be, rather than to seem. Full story »

We live in an age when professional sports coaches go to great lengths to protect their players from the media and avoid airing dirty laundry. Inculcating an us versus them mentality can build team unity and make players more loyal to his team.

NBA coach Stan Van Gundy of the Orlando Magic threw such concerns to the wind with his infamous Dwight Howard-wants-me-fired press conference. But he was likely at wit’s end. Another NBA coach, albeit interim, Mike Woodson of the New York Knicks, has yet to reach Van Gundy’s incendiary heights. But he seems to feel no need protect his players from the media, even though New York is the media capital of the world. Full story »

by Chip Ainsworth

A standing-room perch at the finish line of tomorrow’s Kentucky Derby costs $1,400. Upstairs seating in Millionaires Row and the Turf Club is $6,000 a person, and nosebleed seats in the third-floor grandstand are $650. Trackside parking is $215 and custom-made mint juleps are $1,000.

Such is the allure of being at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May. The turnstiles open Saturday morning at 8 a.m., and the first race of the 10-race undercard should be off at 10:30. Full story »

In case you haven’t been following the New Orleans Saints bounty program story, here’s a quick summary:

• The team, under the direction of key members of the coaching staff, operated a bounty program that rewarded players for hits that injured opponents. In some cases, specific players were targeted, such as then-Viking QB Brett Favre in the January 2010 NFC Championship game. (It was evident to anyone watching that game that the Saints had decided to play dirty, although we didn’t yet know about the bounties. Clearly, though, there was an intent to injure Favre, either within or outside the rules.) Full story »

I take it back, conceding Karl Rove (a.k.a. Turd Blossom) must be smart. Full story »

Science fiction is full of tales of unfettered research gone awry. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man. Them! The Fly. Help me, help me!

For me, it’s Zombies Versus Cheerleaders.

My research has led me into the realm of comics, and so far, it’s been fruitful territory. The Walking Dead. Marvel Zombies. iZombie. The Zombie Survival Guide: Record Attacks.

But finally, I’ve gone too far. Full story »

My doctoral dissertation addressed what I called the “Frankenstein Complex.” So guess why this story bothers me.

Today, a scientific journal published a study that some people thought might never be made public at all.

The paper describes experiments that suggest just a few genetic changes could potentially make a bird flu virus capable of becoming contagious in humans, and causing a dangerous pandemic. Full story »

Stonewall Jackson got me into this whole thing in the first place. I wouldn’t be writing about the Civil War—wouldn’t be studying it, reading about it, interpreting it, giving tours about it, nothing—if it wasn’t for him. My daughter, now 18, fell in love with Stonewall when she was four, and we’ve been following him ever since. This whole Civil War thing is his fault.

In all those years since, May 2 has never come and gone that I’ve not spent time thinking about “Old Jack.” This year was no different. No moment of silence, though. No votive candles. No special readings. Nothing like that. The closest thing came at 9:30 p.m. when a friend texted me: “At about this time 149 years ago, Jackson was shot. Looking up at the moon and getting chills.”

But I think about Jackson a lot on May 2. Full story »

Ever since my family cut the cable, I don’t watch a lot of ads on TV. We watch nearly everything streaming via our Roku these days, and we save a lot of money in the process. But some of the newer series we watch are available only on Hulu+, and that service still has advertisements. I have two main issues with this. First, I pay a monthly fee to watch Hulu+, so I shouldn’t also be forced to watch ads too. Second, Hulu+’s ads play over and over and over again, a problem that Hulu+ shares with the free Pandora service. But everyone once in a while, Hulu+ runs an ad that is not just annoying, but that I find creepy.

Like the following Hulu+ ad for Yakult. Full story »

- I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.

I went to my doctor a few weeks ago for the first time in months. During the course of conversation about my health and how I was doing, etc., we stumbled onto the question of why I hadn’t been in for a visit in so long. I told him that in the wake of my separation from my wife I had lost my insurance coverage (I was on her work plan) and had been unable to get insurance as a result of my pre-existing condition.  Full story »

One can’t help but suspect that a key reason the public and even many policymakers believe that Iran is close to developing nuclear weapons is the sheer length of time that the words “Iran” and “nuclear” have been uttered in the same sentence by the media. Way back in 1957 Iran signed an agreement to participate President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. But Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini temporarily halted Iran’s nuclear efforts, both peaceful and weapons.

In the late eighties and early nineties, AQ Khan, lord of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program as well as the nuclear black market, shared know-how and components with Iran. Then, in late 2002, it was learned that Iran had built a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy water plant at Arak. It appears, though, that in 2003 all but vestigial research toward an Iranian nuclear-weapons program ended. Full story »

Since I’m reading comic books because of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (as if I really need an excuse to read comic books), I’ve decided to turn my attention to a different set of Kirkman’s zombie comics: the Marvel Zombies series.

I never really understood the whole Marvel Zombie craze when the outbreak first appeared. Writer Mark Millar of The Ultimate Fantastic Four created a “Marvel Zombie-verse,” with infected versions of the company’s most prominent characters, and the idea proved so wildly popular that Marvel hired Kirkman to spin the characters off into their own mini-series. That, in turn, spawned eight spin-offs and several other products, including omnibuses, action figures, and trading cards.

“I didn’t even really want to do this book,” Kirkman wrote in the introduction to volume one. Full story »

Thanks, guys. You are just what Cleveland needs: another bad headline: “FBI arrests 5 accused of plotting to blow up Ohio 82 bridge in Cuyahoga valley.” Another in a long string of too-public humiliations: the Cuyahoga River catches on fire, the mayor catches on fire, the Drive, LeBron’s Big Kiss Off. And you wanted to be anarchist terrorists?

Maybe you didn’t hear, but anarchist terrorism is passe. Granted, four of you have bad hair and one of you has a full beard. But it takes more than a hirsute appearance to make one a terrorist. It takes brains. Full story »

by Kaitlin Lindahl

She’s staring at me, her blue eyes wide awake, but I have nothing to say. From outside the bus window, I stare back, entranced. The man a few seats ahead of me is telling me all about her – personal moments that are now engrained as tidbits of fact and history. She’s 14, just come home from school. Her ivory face captured in a complex mix of surprise and serenity – probably nothing like how she looked the moment before she died.

Her name is Annette, and though she’s painted stories high on the side of a building, she’s speaking to me. She died accidentally in a crossfire. A war she had no ammunition for crept into the boundaries of her backyard and took her life. She never had a say. Full story »

On April 29, a paper about how wind farms affect surface temperatures was published online by the journal Nature Climate Change. The authors of the paper found that wind farms increase the nighttime surface temperature within and immediately downwind of the wind farm because the turbines mix up cold surface air with warmer air from up higher off the ground. What the authors did not find, however, was that wind farms were having any global effect on climate disruption. But if you only read articles and blogs from Forbes, Fox News, The Star Ledger, the UK’s Daily Mail, The National Review‘s Planet Gore blog, The Free Republic, etc., you’d never know that.

In fact, if those were your only sources of information, you’d believe that the paper was all about how wind farms were yet another cause of global warming, when in fact it says nothing of the sort. Full story »

Well, the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport released its report on phone hacking today. Words such as “bombshell” have been thrown around in response to a section that…well, let’s let the Committee, or the majority of it anyway, speak for itself:

“On the basis of the facts and evidence before the committee, we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications.

“This culture, we consider, permeated from the top throughout the organisation and speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International. Full story »

It’s May Day, and it’s safe to dance.

No, pro wrestling is not sport. Although it is performed by athletes, just like figure skating and cheerleading are non-sports performed by athletes.

Wrestling is art, opera for the masses. In both, overweight people dress in outlandish costumes and act out over-emotionalized dramas in highly staged spectacles. And like opera, it is a more honest version of the morality play. In morality plays, good always wins out. In opera and wrestling, as in real life, not so much.

As art, it is a window into our fears and insecurities.  Full story »