The roots of all kinds of problems in America (and, I daresay, in Canada and plenty of other places that use the same educational system), are to be found in the schools? I wouldn’t have come to quite that conclusion on my own, but this essay by Paul Graham, titled Why Nerds are Unpopular, posits that thesis. It’s a wonderful piece of writing that certainly threw light on my own middle-school and high-school experience. By all means, read it for yourself. But especially if you know any young people going through school now, having an obviously hard time of it …

I hesitated about whether to place this under sci/tech or politics in my archives. Regardless of what you think about religion, the move to demand that creationism be taught in schools is bad, bad, bad. The investiture of faith required in science is only to believe that there is a world, the workings of which are explicable and understandable—to some degree—by humans. Meanwhile, creationism is flat-out religious dogma, recently garnished by a ton of pseudoscience. The pseudoscience has done nothing to advance our understanding of the world, of our bodies, of how to survive on this planet. Arguable religion has …