The June issue of The Atlantic includes a deep profile of the accomplished but not-very-well-known comedian Albert Brooks. Here's a glimpse of his view of writing: I found a few interesting nuggets in that paragraph. His vision of writing as something you don't stop once you've started seems odd at first. The architect metaphor is funny, sure, but I wonder if his view is rare among writers.

Today begins Blaugust 2024, an annual blogging festival that is fun and challenging. Last year I made it halfway through August with a post every day—this year I'm aiming for 20 posts for the month. The festival aims to create and maintain a community, and so the main theme this year is for everyone to write an "introduction to me and my blog" post.

Evolution is easier than we think, and one great way to see why is to look at what we know about protein evolution. Proteins have been evolving on our planet for about 4 billion years. Their appearance almost certainly precedes the beginning of life itself. We still don't know how the whole thing got off the ground, but once the stage was set (in living cells), evolution began exploring Protein Space.

For five years through 2018, our humanist community, the Humanist Hub*, met every Sunday afternoon at our suite in Harvard Square for fellowship, music, and a speaker. Our advisory board included luminaries of humanism such as Rebecca Goldstein, Steven Pinker, and Dan Dennett. These friends of the organization regularly spoke at Humanist Hub events.

A few days ago I wrote about scientific thinking as an antidote to intuition. Not just an alternative to it, but something like the opposite of intuition. The intentional, energy-consuming move to a systematic deliberative mode of thought is utterly different from the easy and instantaneous nature of intuition.

As I work on a book that will claim that evolution is easy, I have a parallel task of exploring the reasons we sense that it is hard or even impossible. Some of those influences are the result of efforts by religions to maintain dependence on supernaturalism or to defend ancient sacred writings. Some are the result of antipathy to science itself, framed in terms of culture war.

A few years ago, I somehow realized that I wanted to read more stories. My work as a journal editor involved hours of intense scientific reading every day, and my insatiable interest in biology meant that my recreational reading was almost exclusively about science. But I could remember how much I loved stories as a kid: Tom Sawyer , The Black Stallion , all the Roald Dahl things.

'Genome' is now a pretty standard word in our social vocabulary.

This week in the Blaugust 2023 blogging festival, the broad theme is "Introduce yourself." Yesterday I alluded to my bardolatry and its place in the cornerstone of Quintessence of Dust , but that's not really an introduction. So here is a bit more about me: I love the Star Wars universe and I'm into evolution, and both of those things are deeply connected to my main tendency—I'm a rebel.

This blog's name captures my longstanding interest in human nature: humans are apes, and animals, and yet somehow able to create music and gods, and sometimes plays like Hamlet . But what's that strange word at the beginning, 'quintessence'? Here's the context from Hamlet : The word's history suggests that Shakespeare was (as usual) playing games with words and his audience (all quotes from the OED): So, it seems Hamlet is saying