What’s Thin-Film Solar? The Future Today
Last century, solar power struggled to enlighten the renewable resource community. This year, it’s downsizing to thin films you can put on your car and your body, shining the way […]
CLI-FI
Mortgage Underwater? Just Walk Away
No one likes a bad investment, especially when everyone has been making them. The housing meltdown was built on a house of cards called securitization, and it ruined the global […]
Cops Have Lost Their Minds With Tasers
Dude, I’m so happy to be done with my major piece on tasers, and the shock-happy cops that use them, for AlterNet. Talk about your endless bad news. Every day […]
Miyazaki’s Sweet, Surreal Ponyo
A fitting distillation of the filmmaker’s ecological awareness.
Land and Water Grabs In The Age of Climate Change
The economic valuation of land and water has increased in concurrence with both price commodities and the ravages of climate change, whose droughts, wildfires and other extreme environmental events are quickly shrinking what’s left of the planet’s arable land and clean water
A Decade Later, The Iron Giant’s Weaponized Soul Still Stirs
The Iron Giant is beyond naivete or political correctness. It’s a hilarious, tear-jerking and sci-fantastic analysis.
Happy Anniversary, The Iron Giant!
A decade ago today, one of my favorite directors Brad Bird made an animated sci-fi film for children of all ages which utterly annihilated cliche and convention. To date, it […]
After Watchmen, What’s Unfilmable?
This list of five books and comics that may now inherit Watchmen‘s mantle as what Alan Moore called the most “unfilmable” texts around was a popular read.
Questions Swirl Around Medical Mess
[Viggo Mortensen, Perceval Press] In the U.S.A., at this time when at least an incremental step is being considered by Congress toward legally guaranteeing that all citizens have some form […]
What Really Causes Autism? Everything.
I knew about as much as the next journo about autism, before AlterNet sent me in search of its roots and riots. And what usually never happens happened: I came […]
Jeff Lemire’s The Nobody Takes Invisible Man To Twin Peaks
But like Lynch’s Peaks before it, The Nobody‘s impressive science lies not in the mad experiments of the Invisible Man, or the Nobody, but in its subtle dissection of psychology and interpersonal relationships.
California Drought Threatens Entire Nation
The way California is currently wasting water — on elaborate lawns in Beverly Hills, on cow death-camps in the San Joaquin Valley, on whatever — it either doesn’t know where its water comes from or simply doesn’t care.
Currency Wars Coming Right Up!
It’s probably not the sexiest battle on Earth, but it is easily one of the most important. With the econopocalypse ravaging what’s left of the American economy and the currency […]
Hydrogen Sulfide Is A Nasty Way For Life On Earth to Die
Unfortunately, you can usually find H2S whenever and wherever you’ve got mass extinctions.
Wired Dump! Batman, Colbert, Robot Chicken, Stickman Exodus
Mrs. Manface, who sports a five o’clock shadow while kissing her (his?) cherubic hubby.
May Day! Terror and Terraformation
A climatalogical dystopia which can only be saved by sci-fi. Or is that cli-fi?
Battling Extinction With The Linguists
Finally got to dip back into academia and matters of substance for Wired. This time, I talked language extinction and the digital age with a linguist from the movies. It’s […]
Sea Levels Are Rising: Time to Decide Which Coastal Cities Are Worth Saving
Coastal cities, most of the Earth’s most densely populated cities, are due for a drowning.
Pop Lifer Robyn Hitchcock Dreams of Oslo, Synesthesia, Snow
Robyn Hitchcock is a gentleman, an artist and one hell of a prolific songwriter. From his work in the ’70s with The Soft Boys to his escape-minded recent effort Goodnight […]
How Long Will China Buy Our Debt Economy?
It started with a joke, but quickly went viral everywhere from the South China Sea to the White House.
Happy Birthday, The Matrix!
The movie took cyberfiction staples like those found in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy and mashed them together with anime, wire-fu, postmodernism, metaphysics, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations, and a torrent of other texts and contexts.
David Lynch Launches Transcendental Television Site
“The anger that I had when I first started meditating in 1974 lifted in two weeks. It kinda just went away.”
Grant Morrison Gets Deep On Superman, Batman, Cosmology, Crisis
From mind-warping revisions of comic book heroes in All-Star Superman, Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis, to pop-cultural and philosophical exegeses like The Invisibles, The Filth and We3, brainiac graphic novelist Grant Morrison is a master of the Gordian-knot narrative.
Can We Weaponize Earthquakes? We’ll Find Out.
I have been known to mash my science and scfi-fi before, usually because it is usually sci-fi that leads to sci in the first place. But give me a chance […]
Watchmen’s Clockwork Origins Span Comics, Lit, Film, Physics
From Mars’ Galle crater to comics, literature, music, politics and even quantum physics, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons borrowed from a stunning wealth of sources.