Science & Society

In 18 Years, Pumpkin Spice Knocked Out Apple As The Flavor Of Fall

In the fall of 2003, Starbucks tested a new latte in two cities and autumn hasn't been the same since. The pumpkin spice craze was born.  How did it all happen? We can thank free market economics. The company already had Christmas locked up with cups ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Oct 1 2021 - 9:29am

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1952

Wilson Tucker’s 1952 The Long Loud Silence is The Road of the 1950’s. It’s a pure survival story, one about the complete deterioration of society into a vicious, gritty state of no-holds-barred struggle after a nuclear and biological holocaust. Unlike many ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:24pm

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1947

The End of the World as Farce Our road to The Road begins in 1947, with Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think, an apocalyptic comic satire that just cries out for a movie adaptation by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The End of the World as Farce ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:42pm

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1948

Written two years after the catastrophic destruction of World War II ended with the initiation of the nuclear age, Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence is a graphically violent, sexually explicit, and surrealistic expression of Huxley’s bitter disappointme ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:42pm

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1949

With 1949, we arrive at one of the big classics in the post-apocalyptic genre. George Stewart’s Earth Abides is epic in both scope and ambition, a bittersweet story that captures the immense scale on which nature operates, and which portrays the scientific ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:43pm

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1950

Our 1950 pick is L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller's Genus Homo, a pulp adventure that takes place a million years in the future after after the genus Homo has destroyed itself, leaving the field wide open for other ape species to evolve highe ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:44pm

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1951

For our 1951 pick, we have the work of one of the great British writers of sci-fi’s Golden Age. In The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham presents a horror story of giant, ambulatory, flesh-eating plants that topple humans from their dominance of a world th ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:45pm

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1953

Alien Invasion and Evolutionary Succession The possibility of human extinction in End of the World sci-fi is sometimes paired with a consideration of our next evolutionary step- a concept that is less scientific than it sounds (evolution shouldn't be ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:45pm

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1954

Nature is never inexplicable ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:46pm

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1955

Post-apocalyptic Fundamentalism Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is one of many post-apocalyptic novels that envision society returned to a 19th century agrarian state. The rural settings of these novels are commonly used to explore life in a socie ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 13 2021 - 12:47pm