War, Beauty, Balls, and Fraud

Neuron Culture’s Top 5 from July 1. Runaway most popular: The Toughest Plane Ever Built. This post about the plane in which my mother’s lover died spawned two amazing, entwined comment threads: one about tough planes; one about the morality of bombing cities. It also has pictures of B-17s that sustained unreal damage and flew home […]

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Reef Madness 6: The Death of Louis Agassiz

This is the sixth installment of an abridged version of my book Reef Madness: Alexander Agassiz, Charles Darwin, and the Meaning of Coral. The prior installment described how Charles Darwin seduced Harvard botanist Asa Gray, enlisting him in defeating Alexander’s father, the famous creationist zoologist Louis, in a series of debates about Darwin’s theory of evolution. […]

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