Hey, I also skipped third grade and spent fourth grade obsessed with Ghostbusters! So this is what it sounds like when doves cry!

Same with thorium — it's so plentiful we throw it away when we process other minerals. It's as powerful in a fission reactor as uranium, but there's apparently no chance of meltdown. And it's not weaponizable, so Iran could build fifty of them and Israel could sleep soundly.

That's pretty far out there. I mean, Bill Gates inventing the PC and not stealing everything from Steve Jobs? Let's not get too speculative here…

Really? I would have thought the internet would be an inevitable follow-up to the computer.

If I could design the future, humanity would live in self-contained, sustainable cities — basically a thorium reactor powering a desalinization plant supporting hydroponic farms — and we would just leave nature the fuck alone for a few centuries and let things repopulate without our interference.

I liked the running gag on The Critic, where his son goes to a U.N.-affiliated school that's so diverse it includes kids from Easter Island (who have big moai heads), and the Klingon Empire (who are constantly saluting and then beaming away).

Even then, you can conquer a country, but you can't stop the people there from wanting to eat or make money. And even the first part of that statement is questionable, given our failed efforts to conquer Iraq and Afghanistan.

And just when I finished writing that depressing post, someone emailed me this: http://www.fastcodesign.com…

I was just in New Orleans weekend before last. I had only been once, about ten years ago (pre-Katrina). It was great to see that it's still a vibrant, exciting city, with music and great food everywhere you turn. But then I'd get hit with the depressing realization that, barring a miracle, it was going to be gone…

I will always be fascinated at the thought of what would have happened if smallpox and the flu hadn't wiped out the population on this side of the Atlantic. Would the Inca empire have collapsed on its own (probably). Would the Cherokee or Iroquois created an America-style democracy? (since that's who the Founding…

I really think the level of desperation from the right — election-stealing, gerrymandering, etc. — is because they know they have to milk things as much as they can in the short term. Because in the mid-term, demographics are going to mean the Party of White Males are goners at a national level. And long-term,…

Lots of things seem romantic until you learn the details (the Wild West, or for some people, the antebellum South). Gaugin did create lots of gorgeous paintings, and in doing so was among the first to give Europeans glimpses of live in the Pacific, so there's both artistic and historical significance to his work. But…

I live in fear of how history's going to judge a generation that says, "well, we knew the ecosystem was collapsing, so we… ran up a huge debt giving the rich a bunch of tax cuts! Oh, and built the Hummer!"

On that note, Wiki Wormhole's taking a vacation for a few weeks while I load up this Tahiti-bound ship with buttons and nails…

We have this idea that "native" people were stewards of the land, and then Whitey came along and fucked everything up. And that second part is certainly true pretty much everywhere. But the first part really depends. North Americans were very advanced farmers to the point where the effectively terraformed the land to…

Did any Frenchmen come to the Pacific Islands and not molest young girls? The French painter Gauguin is famous for traveling to Tahiti, and introducing the locals to realistic figure drawing and syphillis. He apparently used to hire teenage girls as his assistants, and the Tahitians eventually kicked him out for…

I started that ages ago, but the thing is a brick, so I eventually put it down. But given the recent news that we've killed half of the world's animals in the last 40 years, it's probably worth picking up again to see what horrors await in the next 40.

Americans on both continents were far more advanced at farming than the Europeans, to the point where some archaeologists believe corn was actually genetically engineered by the Olmecs. Corn and potatoes utterly transformed Europe and Africa — the populations there surged because of these new hardy, versatile crops,…

Columbus Day's going to be about the little-known fact that the Columbus Blue Jackets are an actual professional NHL team, with that name, and not a single-A baseball club.

But Rapa Nui has to be the most remote — I read it on Wikipedia!