Brooke Greenberg weighs 15 pounds and is 30 inches long.  To look at her, you see a near-toddler who is maybe a year old.  In fact, she is 16 years old.  Brooke is a child who does not age.

This remarkable girl is documented in this ABC news story and video. The reporter/… Read full post »

The voracious 24-hour news cycle of contemporary media strikes again. The death of megastar Michael Jackson has overshadowed other news of note, in particular recent bombshells on the public stage that - were Jackson still alive - would no doubt be seriously dominating the national headlines today. I… Read full post »

Republicans, and neocons in particular, have done a lot of chest thumping about Iran lately. The “Party of No” gets a lot of mileage out of focusing on emotional tone, bandying it about in lieu of substance, straight facts, or deep thought on the issues. This is reflective, perhaps, of… Read full post »

I was easing into my day, gearing up for a lot of writing I need to get done, when I thought, well, I’ll get that netflix movie out of the way while I’m having brunch, so I can send it back today.

That movie was Seven Pounds, featuring Will Smith and… Read full post »

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” quote has been used as the basis of claims that she is racist, or at the very least, that her remarks - if not herself - are racist. Yet a close reading of her full speech shows instead what a distorted… Read full post »

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently critiqued Obama’s Middle East policy vis-a-vis Israel. Among other things, he cited an “imperious” diktat that Israel cease its settlement expansion. As he put it,

"No ‘natural growth’ means strangling to death the… Read full post »

This is not a joke. The weird world of cloning people just leapt more in our face this week:  a renegade doctor is working on cloning humans, has created embryos and implanted them in women who wanted to be pregnant with the clones. Three of the embryos he made were from… Read full post »

In the “science fiction in unexpected places” realm, I wanted to comment on something I came across today.

I think of science fiction as the fiction of “if”. We ask “what if…”, and then see where that premise takes us.  The earliest forms of this kind of wri… Read full post »