A battle for the soul of America — I’ve been a pundit. I’ve been a scientist. And I can tell you, from personal experience, that the two jobs could not be more different. While some scientists play the role of pundits, it often comes at a cost to their work as scientists. And when some pundits pretend to…

Unreal Constructs Produce Real Harm — A population pyramid is a basic presentation in demography, the study of populations. By convention, it divides a population by sex (not gender; that’s something else) and uses stacked bars to show the number of people in a population by age and sex. Since there are almost always more young…

There’s so much more than “Red versus Blue” The American political system, a “first past the post” system of elections, leads to unnatural division in American politics. Republican and Democratic, Red and Blue, one of the few beliefs all share is they have a fundamental disagreement about core American values…

Thomas Jefferson had his reasons — and we ignore them at our peril In 1776, one of the most influential political documents ever written was published to justify the American Revolution against the British crown. The American Declaration of Independence was a guiding work for people and places as varied…

Types of Capitalism and How America Misses the Mark For several years, American billionaire Leon Cooperman became a minor celebrity for being on the verge of tears while speaking about his concern about “the lefties” proposing a billionaire tax that, in his opinion, destroys capitalism and the American Dream. Cooperman…

Ain’t Statistics Wonderful? Partisanship has always had a role in American politics. Without it, there wouldn’t be American politics. But the past few years have been unique. Donald J. Trump, tapping into and mobilizing an element of this country that hasn’t been seen in this strength since the prosecution and…

Adjusting to the Great Transition (Part 1) Annual global population growth has slowed and begun to decline. Given the best current projections, the “exponential growth” feared forty years ago has crossed the kink, making it an “S-curve” stabilizing in the middle of this century and beginning a slow decline. On…

Complete With a Clear Boundary in the Geological Record — The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) has voted to proceed toward a formal golden spike (GSSP) proposal to define the Anthropocene epoch in the geologic time scale (GTS). This month, the Anthropocene Working Group chose Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada as the site best…

So Much for the Exile…. Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Private Military Company, has been spending time in Russia, according to Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko. …