Iowa Reporter Found Not Guilty By Jury After Arrest At Black Lives Matter Protest

Justice for a brave reporter arrested for doing her essential job, covering a Black Lives Matter demonstration. Thank goodness a fairly selected jury checked the actions of some bad-apple cops, including LEO Luke Wilson, who didn’t want to be observed while on the job. The founders of our nation understood that a healthy democracy requires a free press, not a corrupt police state that serves the interests of the powerful…

Darkest Hour (2017)

I’m not a huge fan of war movies, but my son is fascinated by Winston Churchill. He just showed me Darkest Hour. I loved the cinematography and the language. I really appreciated the attention to the act of composing a text orally with the assistance of a typist. That process is of course very gendered and very dated, but it was a great storytelling device.

The Value of Truth: We are living through an epistemological crisis.

In the jargon of academia, the study of what we can know, and how we can know it, is called “epistemology.” During the 1980s, philosopher Richard Rorty declared it dead and bid it good riddance. To Rorty and many other thinkers of that era, the idea that we even needed a theory of knowledge at all rested on outmoded, Cartesian assumptions that the mind was an innocent mirror of nature;…

Quantum Theatre’s “Far Away” is an enigmatic abstraction, grounded by psychologically deep performances.

Quantum Theatre’s streaming production of “Far Away” is an enigmatic abstraction, grounded by psychologically deep performances. In an unstable landscape of shifting allegiances, just how much faith can we have in own senses, our family members, our co-workers, our own creative impulses, our government, and nature itself? Known for making theatre happen in unusual spaces, Quantum has mounted a thoughtful, intelligent video production of Caryl Churchill’s absurdist evisceration of trust.…

Op-ed: QAnon, the Holocaust and the deadly power of conspiracy theories

The Holocaust was the most murderous and massive manifestation of Jew hatred — and it began and ended with the aid of conspiracy theories. State-sponsored conspiracism fueled the genocide of 6 million innocent human beings. A major pillar of Nazi ideology — and an effective method of drumming up anti-Semitism — was the false accusation that Jews had “stabbed Germany in the back” during World War I. […] One of…

NASA! Mars!! Panorama!!! Video!!!! Audio!!!!!

New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 as the spacecraft plummeted, parachuted, and rocketed toward the surface of Mars. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds from Mars. From the moment of parachute inflation, the camera system covers the entirety of…