• What Does Truth Smell Like?

    Hear me out. We don’t always recognize truth when we see it. In fact, “seeing” isn’t really the right metaphor for our first-line sense of truth; human sight is generally pretty reliable. No, when we come across a new idea or piece of information, it can be quite tricky to determine whether we believe it’s

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  • There Are Such Things as Monsters

    You can check the ending: there’s no cheesy “twist” where the real monsters are human beings. But I do intend to challenge a common nighttime comfort offered to nervous children. I have to think about these kinds of things because I’ll be a first-time father in (God willing) less than a month. The scene is

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  • All the Colors?

    All the Colors?

    How many colors are there? If you’re manufacturing crayons, this is an important question. A standard 8-pack of Crayola crayons, for example, comes with Red, Black, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Purple, and Brown. That’s probably about as many as you would have memorized as a toddler, minus gray and white. But Crayola also offers a

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  • Look Again

    Look Again

    “I wish I could get you to see what I see.”  And after saying that, you have to accept it: they just don’t get it. You can praise it, point out its subtleties, gawk over its unprecedented originality, frame it as the sensation of the century, but, after all that, if they can’t see what

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