The Aldrin Cycler is the best way to mars. In a recent article, Dr. Clive R. Neal, Professor of geology at the University of Notre Dame, stated his case for a return to the moon as a stepping stone to mars. His reasons for a return to the moon…

Cosby, Clinton, Trump The world is full of cultures that condone vampirism; but in America the sun is coming out. Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump are vampires, each a real-world Dracula stalking the night, targeting the weak and vulnerable. In his smart book about literature, Thomas C. Foster…

Across America by Rail — October 1962 In the deep fall of 1962, my mother hauled my two older sisters and me across America to visit her family for the holidays, Southern California to New York City. The journey was the most spectacular event yet in my young life. …

The solution awaits young genius. Think of gravity, the Einsteinian kind, the bowling ball on an elastic tarpaulin. The ball stretches the tarp to a deep, cone-shaped depression and marbles spiral down the slope toward the bottom. In this model the tarpaulin is the space-time continuum, the bowling ball any…

The Double Edged Spork of CRISPR/Cas9 Technology that could make nuclear weapons seem trivial. In the kitchen of life, recipes are written in the four letter alphabet of DNA. Think of DNA as a long shish kebob with four ingredients arranged on the skewer, these are the letters. Geneticist call them nucleotides. Three nucleotide letters spell one amino acid word. Tomato-chicken-onion spells one amino…

America is at war and we are losing. America is at war and we are losing. We have fought and lost major battles in this war repeatedly for forty years. We are under attack again. It’s not the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans who are attacking, and we don’t need to worry too much about…

I want to be near other artists fighting for their creative breath in an unartistic country — Drew Coffman When I was twenty-five I was a bartender on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I wasn’t doing it because my life’s dream was to make a big toke behind the plank. I was an aspiring young novelist and I thought it would be good experience. I was right…

The hotel wasn’t bad as far as Chinese hotels go, but it was in the city of Jiaozuo in Henan province, far enough west of the modern, eastern coast of China that everything was just a little backward, slightly thread worn, and old. But it was way nicer than my…

Legs tired and numb, I slid onto a stool at Lucky Pierre’s S-shaped bar. Mirrored between the bottles were two of my customers from earlier in the night. The two detectives had made my slow shift at the Bourbon Orleans lobby bar worthwhile, telling cop stories and tipping after every…