All posts
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On burial rites … and a meaningful life.
And now… a super-cheerful essay to celebrate my 32nd birthday! If you’re writing about conflicts between religious and scientific worldviews, eventually you get stuck writing about death. Within many religious frameworks, inevitable death lurking somewhere down the line doesn’t alter the meaning of the life that comes before it. I’m typing this essay during the gap…
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On evolution (and why there aren’t more black plants).
As I was reading Freeman Dyson‘s recent collection Dreams of Earth and Sky, specifically his essay on democratizing genetic manipulation, I came across the following passage: “For a plant growing in a hot climate, it is advantageous to reflect as much as possible of the sunlight that is not used for growth. There is plenty…
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On Welcome to Braggsville and…
Because it’s a tragicomic collegiate novel about racism (hey! I wrote one of those too!), I’ve been looking forward to reading Welcome to Braggsville for a while. And, praise be to the local library, I finally got my chance! Thank you, library. Thank you, T. Geronimo Johnson, for caring about these issues enough to write…
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On GM foods.
I thought Mark Lynas‘s New York Times editorial about genetically-modified foods was quite good. Well worth a read, if you have a minute. And it inspired me to jot down something that I’ve been meaning to write for a while: I wish the concepts “grown without pesticides” and “not genetically modified” weren’t so intertwined in this…
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On secular humanism.
After no more than three pages of Philip Kitcher’s Life After Faith, a sentence gave me pause. “Secular humanism begins, after all, with doubt.” I had never heard the phrase “secular humanism” before arriving at college. The first time was two months into fall quarter my freshman year, sitting in the dining hall near the…
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On names (specifically, my own).
What’s that thing Shakespeare wrote about roses? Something about thorns, right? Drat those awful thorns! We live in a pretty small town, where there are 30 or so grocery stores, maybe 10 or so “good” ones, and whichever we pick there’s a decent chance somebody shopping or working there will recognize us and stop to…
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On minotaurs (and whether or not mothers are the root of all maladies).
While reading Eula Biss’s On Immunity, I was often reminded of Rebecca Kukla’s Mass Hysteria. Both works analyze the permeability of bodies, especially mothers and children, while drawing from literature, philosophy, and medicine. Their major divergence is in tone; Kukla’s work can veer academic (which I enjoy, being a pedantic fuddyduddy myself); Biss’s writing is…
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On autism and vaccines.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first, shall we? Vaccines don’t cause autism. If you’ve got a kid with a standard operating immune system, you oughta get that sucker vaccinated. If you yourself have a standard operating immune system, and you’re considering living in a place where certain diseases that you aren’t immune…
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On violence against women (part three): rape, evolution, and the dangers of partial truths.
This is third in a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2. Were you sired by a jerk? Don’t worry! You can still be good! I’m mostly familiar with two theories addressing the question, “Why do men rape?” One comes from feminism, like the thesis put forward in Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: violence against women…
Frank Brown Cloud 