In the Golden Age of video arcades, there was nothing more intimidating, or enticing, to a kid than a new video game with some wacky control interface — the game Defender had about 100 buttons, Atari’s tank commander game Battlezone had two handles that (I guess) were supposed to simulate…

For the better part of 2,000 years, Christians have been engaging in one of the faith’s most entertaining pasttimes: Antichrist spotting. The Antichrist in the Bible is originally identifed as a deceiver, or a bunch of deceivers, out to spread an anti-Gospel: that Jesus wasn’t divine, or that he never…

History Books, the new album from Gaslight Anthem has a few things going for it: it’s their first album as a band in six years, it’s more musically interesting than some of their earlier work, and they pulled in Bruce Springsteen to sing on the title track. …

America does not have, and has never had, a single unifying culture. Yes, we all love pizza, television, Tom Hanks, and ice cubes in our water. But, much as I love pop culture, it’s not identical to the deep cultural values that motivate our thoughts and political decisions. At that…

If there’s a polar opposite to the kind of underground, lefty, beat-poet-ridden coffee shop that American cities reliably produced from the 1950s to the early 2000s, the Capital One Board of Directors has perfected it with the Capital One Café. The café as a hangout for dissidents, rebels, and poets…

Why is that the inventor of the light bulb, the telephone, and the radio are all household names, but the inventor of the thing that (until relatively recently) we spent the most time staring at — the television — is not remotely as well known? Applying Occam’s Razor to this…

Every so often, the Gallup Poll asks Americans whether or not they believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God. As one might expect, the proportion of people saying “Yes” has been declining slowly but steadily over time, and as of June 2022 it had dropped to 20%…

If I’m re-considering it, the fizzy sugar-water industry is in trouble I am not a nutritionist. If anything, I am an anti-nutritionist. I do have fuzzy ideas about “all things in moderation”, but in my context that means keeping myself to a single Little Debbie cupcake per meal. While the rest of the world already got the message about sugar being…

One of the trivial hardships of summer in North America, along with poison ivy (or oak, or sumac), sunburns, and a spoiled half of a watermelon taking up good refrigerator space, is the fruit fly: Drosophila melanogaster. The fruit fly’s greatest weapon may be that it, in small numbers, it…