When Carl Sagan, the late astronomer and original Cosmos host, published his first novel, Contact, in 1985, Studs Terkel, the long-time radio broadcaster, asked him a month later to chat with him. Their subject, of course, was aliens, and the question of whether we’d ever establish good relations with them. In their conversation—which Blank on Blank, […]

Richard Loveless believes trans-disciplinary collaborations can inspire creativity and pioneer new ways of thinking. That’s why, in 1991, he became the founding Director of the Institute for Studies in the Arts, a premiere arts research group in the College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University. During his nine-year tenure, he’s funded over 200 projects […]

One girl’s scientific coming of age.

We didn’t say “break the Internet” back in 1999, but if we did we could certainly say that science-fiction author David Brin broke the Internet when he wrote in Salon that “Stars Wars belongs to our dark past. A long, tyrannical epoch of fear, illogic, despotism and demagoguery that our ancestors struggled desperately to overcome, […]

Saving her planet would ban her from paradise.