Have you ever killed your dinner? I did a few times in the last year, but I don't think I'm going to bother anymore. Last March I started dating a vegan. Not the in-your-face PETA variety, more the kind with the quiet integrity, who tries not to be a bother...

Science Magazine just published a great article about peak oil, and I realized it's been exactly a decade since I became "peak oil aware." 9/11 had just happened, and to try and understand the world I did something I wasn't, as an American, supposed to do -- I...

It seems our brother nation to the south has caught our disease. Mexico is in the grips of a civil war, fought with our guns to provide us with illegal drugs. Gangs fight each other, the police fight the army, and the feds kidnap citizens and torture them...

If the Tea Party actually gave a damn about what the Founding Fathers said, they'd be screaming at the top of their lungs about getting rid of the most pernicious threat to our liberty and solvency that ever existed: our military. Forget about the two to six trillion dollar cost...

Things fail. Businesses, relationships, cars, you name it. Everyone knows this, and as humans we are an adaptable species capable of learning from our failures, processing the lessons learned, and building a better system the next time around. It's only when we become ossified and refuse to accept the risk...

I've felt a little like a grizzled old veteran amongst the jejune activists at the Occupy Durham general assemblies -- thrilled to see the sudden burst of enthusiasm, terrified lest most of it perish like the radish seedlings that I just thinned in the fall salad garden, perishing in the...