ART HOBSON: What's up, America?
The United States accounts for 4 percent of world population but 25 percent of covid-19 deaths. Although individual Americans pay twice what individual Europeans pay for health care, covid-19 kills us...
August 25, 2020
ART HOBSON: Slavery, a partial history
It's said that people who don't understand their history are condemned to repeat it. In this spirit, the Black Lives Matter movement prompts me to review the early history of American slavery.
It beg...
June 23, 2020
ART HOBSON: Covid-19 in perspective
In considering the human dimensions of wars, floods, airplanes demolishing tall buildings, plagues and other mass tragedies, one needs benchmarks for perspective. My standard benchmark has long been U...
June 2, 2020
ART HOBSON: What happened to the Mideast?
The first sentence of Kim Ghattis' book Black Wave, a tragically beautiful post-1979 history of the Middle East, asks "What happened to us?" This haunting question, and the book's sub-title "Saudi Ara...
May 12, 2020
ART HOBSON: The greatest show on Earth
It's an ironic commentary on the real condition of our supposedly "advanced" nation that fully 38 percent of Americans are "young-Earth creationists" who, even in the face of today's overwhelming coun...
April 21, 2020
ART HOBSON: A welcome connection
Covid-19 is a perfect example of an oft-noted environmental principal: Everything is connected. All life is related through biological evolution. The planet shapes life through geological change while...
March 31, 2020
ART HOBSON: The wrong way forward
With congested highways, crumbling pavement, sluggish public transit, lengthy airport queues, a mere 22,000 miles of slow (under 125 mph) passenger rail and no fast trains, U.S. transportation is stuc...
March 10, 2020
ART HOBSON: Understanding the new coronavirus
The new coronavirus is an environmental issue arising from human disruption of our planet's wildlife. We thoughtlessly proliferate our numbers; blast highways through jungles; eat wild animals; clear ...
February 18, 2020
ART HOBSON: Blundering into a new forever war
Last June, following the announcement of still more crippling sanctions on Iran, President Trump added fuel to the fire with a few tweets: "Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with gre...
January 28, 2020
ART HOBSON: Exploring the starry sky
The 2019 Nobel Prize in physics honored humankind's fascination with the starry sky and our progress in understanding the nature of the universe. Except for sex, the stars might be our longest-standin...
January 7, 2020
ART HOBSON: The fate of the Earth
A year ago I wrote a column based on Steven Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress." It's an eye-opening analysis of modern times. The book paints an op...
December 17, 2019
ART HOBSON: Scientists discover exoplanets
Twenty-four years ago, astronomers Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz started something big. They made science's first discovery of a planet orbiting a typical star outside our solar system. Their search...
November 5, 2019
ART HOBSON: These Truths recommended to people of all ideologies
Award-winning historian Jill Lepore has written a large political and cultural history of our nation, from Columbus through the early months of Donald Trump's presidency. These Truths: A History of th...
October 15, 2019
ART HOBSON: Will Iran get the bomb?
The tragic paradox of nuclear weapons is that nations obtain them out of fear of other nations' nuclear weapons. Ironically, this was even true of the world's first nuclear power. The U.S. Manhattan P...
September 24, 2019
ART HOBSON: The bomb and how it works
The consequences of nuclear weapons are horrendous, but the science is fascinating. To prevent the horror, citizens must learn some of the related science.
Our familiar world is made of atoms. There a...
September 3, 2019