book excerpt

For years, studying zoology made me feel like a sad misfit. Not because I loved spiders, enjoyed cutting up dead things I’d found by the side of the road, or…

Throughout the industrial age and now in the information age, the Amish have adhered to the long-standing tradition of making as a primary form of work.The…

So much of what marginalized people go through at work comes down to the workplace environment: how people in the office get along with one another, who asks…

But we’ve been telling the same story about ARPANET and the web for 25 years, and it isn’t satisfying anymore. It doesn’t help us understand the social…

Joel scheduled a talk in October 2019 at the University of Waterloo in Canada with the straightforward title: “Can we help people pick better romantic…

Via the digital channels of Extinction Rebellion LA, Charlie came across an article I published arguing that activism wasn’t always the answer to eco-anxiety…

One of the most surprising phenomena I’ve encountered since I began making television appearances in 2017 is the sudden proliferation of men in my Twitter…

I never knew what my back did for me until I broke it. Turns out, it did everything. It helped me stand, sit, and lie down. It helped me walk and run. But…

How much do we need humans in space?  How much do we want them there?  Astronauts embody the triumph of human imagination and engineering.  Their efforts…

I know three people recovering from Covid at the moment. I know this because they told me.That might not seem like a big deal these days, when a Covid…