Essays

Essays and reviews for 3 Quarks Daily

Physics/Physics History
Canali, Aristocrats, Ant-Men: David Baron on Mars (2025)
A Quantum Correspondence (2025)
Bouncing Droplets Refute the Multiverse? (2024)
Physical Analogies and Field Theory (2024)
The Posthumous Trials of Robert A. Millikan (2024)
How Quantum Models Work (2023)
Quantum Field Theory, “Easier Than Easy” (2023)
What Entanglement Doesn’t Imply (2022)
On Reading a Defense of William Shockley (2022)
Philip Anderson’s Emergence as Himself (2021)
Guessing With Physics (2021)
The Slightly Wrong Physics of Spinning Muons (2021)
Easy to Defend, Hard to Believe (2020)
Things Hang Together, Things Fall Apart (2020)
Twilight of the Quantum Idols (2020)

Politics/Conspiracy Theorizing
The UFO Disclosure Trap (2026)
Moral Infohazards for Digital Selves (2025)
Anthony Fauci’s Limited Hangout (2024)
Sympathy for the Deplorables? (2023)
The Limits of Conspiracy Debunking—Revisited (2022)
Exorcising a New Machine (2022)
The Limits of Conspiracy Debunking (2021)
Science and The Phenomenon (2021)

Sociology/Philosophy of Science
How Much of Science is Secret? (2025)
Tech Intellectuals and the “TESCREAL Bundle” (2025)
Making Sense of “The Golem” (2024)
Free Will, Pragmatism, and Things Best Left Unsaid (2024)
The Philosopher of Quantum Reality (2023)
The Incommensurable Legacy of Thomas Kuhn (2023)
A Paradox Concerning Scientists and History (2022)
Scientific Models and Individual Experience (2022)
Which Scientific Bets Should Be Denied? (2022)
Scavenging Science: On John Horgan and Tao Lin (2021)
The World and Its Mask (2020)
Atoms for Aliens? (2020)

Cultural Criticism/Personal
The Manosphere in the Middle (2026)
Conservative Postmodernism and the Stuck Culture Hypothesis (2026)
George Bailey on the Bridge (2025)
Parenthood, Conservatism, and the Existing World (2023)
Meat and Pets: A Double Feature (2021)
The Movie That Watches You (2021)
Glassholes Revisited (2021)
Tesla at the Movies (2020)

Reviews 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)

Reviews 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)

Scattered pieces

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)