Peter Orner’s latest masterwork presents an uncrossable paternal schism―to cross it we’ll have to open a few more books — Part 1 in a 2-part series inspired by Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin. Peter Orner has been known for writing highly readable, accessible short (and often bite-sized) tales that among other things, deliver an emotional wallop. Unlike his contemporaries Dan Chaon or Elizabeth Strout, whose emotion-infused…

With a single universe, Intelligent Design is all but a certainty. With multiple universes, a different tale arises. — In articles past, we’ve explored possible relationships between Mathematics and the divine, such as showing through Math that the afterlife might exist, and attempting to prove through Math that God does exist. But a different perspective from Alan Lightman, and his book The Accidental Universe brings a different concept into…

The fourth connection might be responsible for half of the world’s creativity — At first, the poet Emily Dickinson and the novelist Franz Kafka might not seem connected. They are both influential writers to be sure, but beyond their general impact, the similarities seem to end. …

Symbology, Fictions, Hierarchies, and the unquantifiable power they grant humanity — Why do humans have such power over the earth? Or perhaps a better question to ask is: why don’t other species hold such power? Other species are certainly intelligent. …

With this simple equation―and an analogy―the evidence for God is strong enough to present in a court of law The concept of faith has been somewhat at odds with the concept of science since dawn immemorial, or at the very least, since the Enlightenment. When you add the rigors of the Scientific Method, and in particular the burden of finding transparent reproducibility, it seems that the concept of belief―particularly…

How an enhancement to our dorsolateral prefrontal right cortex might allow a person to bypass the laws of physics, go back in time and change the entire universe, for everyone — Can we travel back in time? Short answer: the laws of physics seem to suggest the answer is no. In this essay however, we won’t deal with the observable laws of physics — at least not directly. Instead, we’ll examine our powers of perception, explore how enormous those powers are…

Duke of Urbino — meet the Internet. Florence-born oligarch Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici got into a bit of hot water after one of his Tweets gathered a bit more contempt than he may have initially schemed for. The Tweet shows an image of the Duke surrounded by grateful and loyal vassals, with the text: Just won…

How Albert Camus’ The Stranger Suggests Humanity’s True Purpose — The Stranger Albert Camus published a short, accessible tale called The Stranger in 1942. It is an absurdist, existentialist tale — and though Camus rejected the existentialist label, The Stranger certainly carries themes that explore the very nature of human existence, and perhaps existence itself. And this tale might suggest humanity’s true…

Anne Rice’s Louis has no phobias, and neither should I — The moment when I began to fear spiders When I was in the third grade, I opened a large textbook at random, and what I saw frightened me so thoroughly that it gave me a phobia for the next two decades. It was a two-page spread of a tarantula — its eight legs were splayed out across the…