Earlier this month was the 9th annual Silly Putty Drop at the North Carolina State science and engineering summer camp. Campers watch a 100-pound ball of silly putty fall 141 feet and splat on the ground. The results are not very interesting actually. It breaks into a gazillion pieces...

The horrifying scene at a practice field in Alexandria, Virginia, at which Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in a shocking flurry of gunfire, could have been much worse. Rand Paul pointed out that “it would have been a massacre” had a member of the House leadership not been there. His...

Government, from time immemorial, has been bureaucratic, maddening, and often cruel. You can read about this in the ancient manuscripts. Chuang Tzu in the 4th century B.C., for example, wrote: “I would rather roam and idle about in a muddy ditch, at my own amusement, than to be put under...

In his speech withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, Donald Trump cited an econometric study by National Economic Research Associates. The study, which is both credible and alarming, speculated that meeting the emissions targets could cost 2.7 million jobs, with manufacturing hit...

I first started writing before the Internet existed. We all wrote for an audience we mostly had to imagine in our minds. It seems as long ago as the War of the Roses. The only way to give an author feedback was to write a letter, put it in an envelope with an approved stamp, and give it...

A parent was discussing her child’s obsession with home-made edible slime, feeling some relief that this trend had displaced the annoying bottle-flipping craze of early 2016. Unbeknownst to her, slime is about to be displaced in turn by the newest fashion: fidget spinning. In a mere three...

As life proceeds, you collect ever-more interesting observations about how things work: things you cannot fathom in youth but which you gradually come to realize later in life. People don’t tell you these things when you are young. What I’m going to tell you is supposed to remain...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve puzzled about why people become communists. I have no doubt about why someone would stop being one. After all, we have a century of evidence of the murder, famine, and general destruction caused by the idea. Ignoring all this takes a special kind of...

Ever wonder why state and local government can’t run billions and trillions in deficits and the federal government can? True, lower levels of government typically have rules in place that prevent it, but there’s more going on. What restrains them are the same forces that restrain...

I’m thinking about the problem of disappearing frogs. Where do we stand with that? Well, Amphibians.org has the Disappearing Frog Project, a global effort to save the frog from the ravages of economic development. The latest update to this site was February 17, 2017, and if you go back a...