Essays

Essays for The New Atlantis:
The Big Whimper (2022)
Inventing the Universe (2020)
Steven Weinberg Glimpses the Promised Land (2019)
Did Thomas Kuhn Kill Truth? (2018)
Pop Goes the Physics (2017)

Essays for 3QuarksDaily:
The Incommensurable Legacy of Thomas Kuhn (2023)
A Paradox Concerning Scientists and History (2022)
What Entanglement Doesn’t Imply (2022)
The Limits of Conspiracy Debunking—Revisited (2022)
Exorcising a New Machine (2022)
Scientific Models and Individual Experience (2022)
On Reading a Defense of William Shockley (2022)
Which Scientific Bets Should Be Denied? (2022)
Philip Anderson’s Emergence as Himself (2021)
Scavenging Science: On John Horgan and Tao Lin (2021)
Meat and Pets: A Double Feature (2021)
The Movie That Watches You (2021)
Guessing With Physics (2021)
The Slightly Wrong Physics of Spinning Muons (2021)
The Limits of Conspiracy Debunking (2021)
Glassholes Revisited (2021)
Science and The Phenomenon (2021)
The World and Its Mask (2020)
Easy to Defend, Hard to Believe (2020)
Tesla at the Movies (2020)
Things Hang Together, Things Fall Apart (2020)
Atoms for Aliens? (2020)
Twilight of the Quantum Idols (2020)

Essays for the Las Angeles Review of Books:
Higher Laughter: On Jim Holt (2018)
The Prophets Leave Hometown: Three Physicists Try Philosophy (2015)
Data Grubbers: Epidemiology, Sabermetrics, Octopus Paul, and You (2015)
Does Science Need Hollywood? (2015)
Fairy Tale Physics and Poisoned Cocktails (2013)
Quantum Absolutism: Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn (2013)

Other scattered essays:
Agents in the Ether (Inference, 2022)
Unlocking the Treasures (Skeptical Inquirer, 2015)
Psychedelics for Suburbanites (Motherboard, 2015)
Skin in the Game: Two Versions of Cheap Meat (2014)
Sleeping at Arcosanti (2014)
How Physics is Like Three-Chord Rock (Nautilus, 2013)
Something in the Water: Chinatown and L.A.’s Originary Sin (Motherboard, 2013)
A Visit to the Shell of the Bomb (Motherboard, 2013)
Higgs for the Masses (2013)