A little poking around on the website Statista revealed some interesting information to me. In 2022, law enforcement across the United States did kind of a good job clearing certain kinds of crimes. 52.3 percent of homicides were solved, which is not bad!* Should those rates be higher? Sure, but consider that the United States […]

If not for the atomic bomb, I might not be here. My father came of age during World War II. He trained to be a pilot in 1945, and even after Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker, the common wisdom was that a war was still on, that Japan would never surrender. The common […]

Late last summer, following the fast-growing trend, my gym made the decision to convert the entirety of its rooftop tennis courts into Pickleball courts. I get it. Pickleball is low-impact and all-inclusive. I see husbands and wives playing, the coordinated and the not-so-coordinated playing, the fit and not-quite-as fit, and plenty of elderly. Sometimes all […]

One of the keenest pleasures found in moviegoing is that of competence porn. A great comedy can flood your brain with endorphins, a solid horror movie can unnerve you days after you saw it, and the right drama can restore your faith in the essential decency of humanity. Even the much-maligned superhero genre can, when […]

During a press conference in 2007, Matt Damon figured that he was all done playing amnesiac badass Jason Bourne. He said, “So all of that internal propulsive mechanism that drives the character is not there, so if there was to be another one then it would have to be a complete reconfiguration, you know, where […]

The Martian is the movie we need right now. We live in an era of astonishing selfishness and decreasing selflessness. These days, fewer people study science and engineering during their college years. In fact, business is the most popular college major. Lots of us are taught that the proper trajectory in life is to get a […]