Analog Nation

Earth’s salvation rests in a display case on the Upper West Side. It is a cloth, somewhere between a rug and a shawl, with long, wispy tassels. A dizzying pattern weaves up and down its length, the work of many hands. It is a nearly perfect shade of gold. Dozens of pins hold the cloth [...]

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Having grown up in the 80s, I know a thing or two about witnessing an arms race. After blowing things up for a thousand years or so, we as a species had finally gotten truly excellent at it, to the point where there was an actual chance that we might blow up every single thing, [...]

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Doctors are basically the modern equivalent of shamans. They poke us, they prod us, they look inside us with weird, uncomfortable flashlights, and then they give us an incomprehensible ten minute monologue. For all their medical advancements and calculated science, the instant they open their mouths they might as well be talking about rooster entrails [...]

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One of the basic tenets of popular culture is that the villain is always one piece away from completing his master plan. Sauron needed the One Ring. Belloq needed the Staff of Ra. Megatron needed the Allspice, or something — honestly, that movie made so little sense, my back started to hurt (I’m not kidding). [...]

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When I was in ninth grade, Miss Axton gave us a project. We were to build a replica of an ancient structure, and write a paper about it — why the structure was important, what it was used for, how it impacted culture, blah blah blah. For mine, I decided to do the Parthenon, largely [...]

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Let’s say you’re a scientist. You wear a lab coat, you rock the clipboard, you nudge the bridge of your glasses to keep them from sliding down. You have been in the private sector. You have delivered results. And as you toil away in your fluorescent, dust-free environment, you have one goal: To accidentally doom [...]

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