“The biggest challenge to getting functioning space hotels and moon colonies might not even be, you know, building them and subsisting in space,” writes Jason Koebler (“The First Space Colonies Might Be Illegal,” Vice, May 15). “Instead, it might be navigating the tricky international legal framework governing off-world ownership.” Koebler’s concerns, which he hangs on…

It’s been a pretty bad couple of weeks on the climate front. Two separate teams of climate scientists warn that the collapse of the western Antarctic ice sheet has already begun and is now too late to stop. The six glaciers already in retreat are enough, by themselves to add four feet to global sea…

[Note: This piece was originally written as a letter to the editor of the New York Times in reply to its “Invitation to a Dialogue” on alternative therapies.] As Dr. Gordon notes, legislation ostensibly aimed at increasing the affordability of health care has had the effects of locking in a status quo of needlessly high levels of costly treatment required…

It’s over. As the evening started on Thursday (May 15), the Military Police of the State of Pernambuco, in Brazil decided to finish a strike that had lasted the whole day. Looting, depredations, disorder and murder all happened during the strike. Stores closed, people went home. “Arrastoes” (“draggings,” where large groups of people set off…

In Seattle, St. Louis and elsewhere, “ridesharing” services such as Uber and Lyft are causing a kerfuffle. These services, which allow users to submit orders via a smartphone app that are then filled by individuals driving their own cars, run afoul of long-standing regulations requiring the special licensing of taxis by municipal authorities. These licenses,…

In the village of Kalabalge, in the northern Nigerian state of Borno, the people struck back. While politicians dithered and activists twittered, the people of Kalabalge armed themselves and took the fight to their enemies, ambushing a Boko Haram convoy en route to attack their village. At least forty-one Boko Haram militants were killed and ten…

Like any other Para-born person, I like acai (pronounced “assa-IH,” people) a lot. Every Paraense, regardless of socio-economic status, eats it. It is an undeniablefact of life in Para. If you live in the capital, Belem, that is a constant reminder that we live in the Amazon, just like the herons downtown. Acai, as it is traditionally…

Of all the complex wicked problems facing the biosphere today perhaps the most contentious, and ultimately the most important, is climate change. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters  from lead author Eric Rignot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory adds to the already substantial body of evidence that climate change poses an immediate threat to human civilization. The study notes that due…

It is common in Brazil to say, “Text with no context is pretext.” The wordplay conveys a valuable truth: Out of context reasoning can be easily used as pretext for an agenda. To comprehend reality outside of context can serve interests very different from those originally intended. This should be a wakeup call for the…

Two researchers at Utah State University have discovered a factor which may be silently impacting the much-discussed, but poorly understood, gender wage gap. Lindsey McBride and Grant Patty examined the gender bias of occupational licensing requirements. What they found is that —  at least at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder — women are…

In Nigeria, radical Islamic group Boko Haram has carried out a series of horrific attacks, culminating in the recent abduction of 234 girls from a boarding school in the city of Chibok. The group allegedly intends to sell the girls into slavery. The Nigerian government pledges to free them, but thus far reports on the…

For decades taxi regulations have served as the textbook example of government regulations creating artificial enclosures, rents, and wage labor. In addition to a host of prohibitous regulations that even extend to the color of a driver’s socks, the “medallion” system dramatically limits the number of taxi in major cities while at the same time…

It’s common for Democrats to depict themselves as the “party of compassion,” as opposed to the Wall Street stooges in the GOP,  resorting to soccer mom rhetoric about “American working families” and “sitting around the kitchen table.” Republicans, on the other side, frame themselves as the “free enterprise” party — unlike those anti-business socialists on…

Around the country, consumers are greeting newly arrived rideshare and taxi alternative companies like Lyft and Uber with fanfare. Some people, though, aren’t so happy. Taxi companies, for example, are lobbying city and local governments to heavily regulate and outright ban these services from the streets — ostensibly for “safety” reasons. One group in Seattle…

Brazil is a violent country. A sizable part of the population experiences many aggressions in its streets. However, violence in Brazil is present in prisons too. There, it can take very subtle forms, which very few people – except those who suffer from it – come to know about. Among these subtle forms of violence are…

After yet another terrifying botched execution, questions about whether the death penalty constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” once again fill the air. Perhaps, though, now may be time to pose even more radical questions about criminal justice. The particular incident sparking national attention this time was a lethal injection in McAlester, Oklahoma that failed to…

The government of Oklahoma did not botch an execution on Tuesday. When the administration of an untested combination of drugs fails, we do not describe the treatment as “botched,” but simply as a failed experiment. Last night, the government of Oklahoma conducted an unsuccessful experiment on a human being without his consent. This man, a…

Americans have been conditioned to think of May Day as a “commie holiday,” one associated until recently with military parades in Red Square and leaders of Marxist-Leninist regimes exchanging “fraternal greetings” in the names of their respective peoples. They might be surprised to learn it was originally an American holiday, created by Chicago workers in…

In a New York Times letter to the editor (“Invitation to a Dialogue: Unequal Schooling,” April 22), Heather Gautney – a professor of sociology at Fordham University – expresses understandable dismay at the inequitable distribution of resources in the public school system. After citing the common American belief that “education is the great opportunity equalizer –…

The passing of Gabriel García Márquez last Thursday was a particularly painful moment for anyone in Latin America – or elsewhere – who ever indulged in the sublime pleasure of reading any of the literary master’s works. But for me, the pain of the event was not exclusively due to “Gabo” all of a sudden…