I woke up a 2am last night, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I also didn’t feel like getting up. I know the reason: today is the first day of classes, and I always feel some low-level anxiety before getting up in front of 30 strangers and talking for an hour. The one thing I’ve learned in 45+ years of this business is how to hide it.

I’m really good at concealing the fact that my guts are writhing and my brain is whirling and I’m sure I’ll forget what I’m supposed to say as soon as I step up to the lectern. I just refuse to let it show.

Also, don’t you dare tell me to imagine my audience naked — these are 19-20 year old students, the thought of that would send my anxiety through the roof and also would be morally wrong.

J. Jonah Jameson got his way and Minneapolis Spider-Man was unjustly arrested, alongside arch-criminal and career racist Jake Lang. Fortunately, there is a friendly neighborhood GoFundMe to support him!

I am raising funds for SPIDER-MAN, a Minneapolis antifascist superhero! On August 22, 2026, Nazi provocateur Jake Lang came to our city to rally fellow racists to his cause. Community members showed up to protest, and SPIDER-MAN was among them. Bravely defying a phalanx of MPD officers, he taught the Nazi a lesson he will not soon forget. But then! After letting the Nazi get away, the MPD officers tackled SPIDER-MAN to the ground and arrested him!

Minneapolis, let’s stand up for SPIDER-MAN the way he stood up for us. This money will go directly to him to defray the costs of bail, legal fees, or whatever else he decides to use it for.

I bet they’ll take your donations even if you aren’t from Minneapolis.

I found an old photo.

That’s my late brother Jim, me, and my brother Mike, just hanging out at my mother’s house several years ago.

Classes haven’t started just yet, but I’m meeting my new advisees today. They’re all pre-nursing students! The world needs more nurses so I’m happy to welcome them and inform them of the horrors OPPORTUNITIES that await them. We actually do provide a good structure for preparing students for nursing programs, and we also have an early admission plan to the Twin Cities med school/nursing program, so I get to share good news with them. I spent a good chunk of yesterday reviewing the requirements.

The bad news might be that we expect them to complete a bachelor’s degree in biology, so it’s a bit rigorous and demanding. But we all want well-trained nurses, right?

First lesson: don’t cross your arms and stare at your patients. It’s unsettling.

One of the drawbacks to volunteering at the local theater is that you have to sit through way too many showings of movies you don’t like. I’ve suffered through four showings of Spider-Man: Spiderless New Day so far. I don’t actually sit through the movie, but instead wait in the concessions area, listening to the absurdly loud booming noises.

This may be advantageous as the school year starts — I’ll be able to bring my laptop and gets some work done while simultaneously supporting the theater.

Anyway, now I get to dwell on why I don’t like a Spider-Man movie, and Tom the Dancing Bug captures my feelings.

Where Marvel took a wrong turn was the success of those colossal match-ups where they scrape up every superhero from their long and storied history to fight the big bad guy. So you’ve got the guy who was bit by a radioactive spider, and the guy who turned green (originally gray, I know this because I’m old) from gamma ray exposure, a guy who built a suit of armor, a woman trained as an assassin, a literal god from a pagan pantheon, a sorceror supreme, a guy who can get really big or really small, a guy with a bow and arrow, etc. Individually, I could suspend disbelief to get through a story, but together…total indigestible chaos, that requires an excessive amount of exposition to get us to the point where the central plot even makes any progress. Apparently, the lesson Marvel has learned is that all their movies will be mash-ups of disparate superheroes with unrelated superpowers, and I hate it.

You don’t need that to make a long elaborate science-fiction story. A great counter-example: The Expanse, a multi-episode space opera. There is one key postulate, the contrivance of the unfortunately named Epstein Drive, which allowed a technological society to expand cheaply and rapidly enough to set the stage on which the human drama plays out (I think the bits where they introduce aliens and magical interstellar travel weakens the overall story, because it’s throwing in way too many gimmicks).

The better movie would be one where a relatable human story is told, with one magical being, no more, introduced to complicate events in interesting and novel ways. They aren’t ever going to do that any more. Stories aren’t as important as CGI slam-bam with lots of noise.

When I was in college, many years ago, one of the hobbies sweeping through the youth (and older) was the Society for Creative Anachronism — putting on padding, taking a sword made of rattan wrapped in foam, and pounding on each other in fake medieval battles. I thought it was fun to watch, but was never going to join in. When I imagined medieval warfare, I would always be the peasant with a stick getting trampled into the mud.

Nowadays the big thing is Buhurt. People dress up in real steel armor and use real steel (but blunted) swords to hack at each other until someone falls down. No thank you very much. But my son, the one in the army, has joined a team out there in Washington state. We also have a team in Minneapolis. I am not at all tempted.

He’s the one with the shaved head on the right. He’s using borrowed armor because that stuff is expensive.

I guess military testosterone levels are just fine.

I just did an interview with a journalist who is trying to answer that question. I was not very helpful. I knew Adam Bly as a publisher and promoter of science popularizers — he’s the guy who created Seed Magazine and Scienceblogs, once upon a time, and I met him several times, and he paid me extravagant sums to write Pharyngula and stories for Seed. Good times.

But today I learned that Jeffrey Epstein owned a 26% stake in Seed Media.

I knew that Bly was a kind of wunderkind in cancer research, but I didn’t know much else about him. I didn’t even know what specific research he was known for.

In 2007, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal.

He began his career at the age of 16 as the youngest researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, where he spent three years studying the biochemistry of cancer, specifically the role of cell adhesion in metastasis. Out of the lab, he founded Seed – tag-lined “Science is Culture™” – and served as its Editor-in-Chief. “

What I did know was that he abruptly erupted out of Canada, moved to New York City, and was somehow shuffling millions of dollars around in various scientific enterprises. None of us sciencebloggers had any idea where all his money was coming from, but we accepted it. We should have known it was too good to be true.

Anyway, Scienceblogs and Seed Media folded in 2010-2011, but we’d seen presentiments in 2009, when the company was showing financial strain, and the ads were becoming increasingly obnoxious, culminating in the notorious PepsiGate disaster, in which Bly sold out to PepsiCo and revealed himself as a corporate shill. The diaspora followed, with bloggers (including myself and Ed Brayton, who generated most of the traffic to Scienceblogs) abandoning it to move to other sites.

Looking back, I can see a suggestive correlation. Seed Media was getting desperate for new financial backing in 2009; Jeffrey Epstein was locked up (under the cushiest of conditions) in 2008-2009. Another person who was suffering Epstein withdrawal at that time was John Brockman:

Although Epstein was evidently no intellectual (physicist Sean Caroll described him as “a standard, fast-talking charlatan who trotted out big words with no real understanding”), he had a knack for Machiavellian manipulations tied to gifts and favors. In a travesty of potlatch ceremonies, the gifts that the academics brought to the parties were not intended just for Epstein but also for his clan of billionaires and celebrities. The ceremonies were held at opulent intellectual ‘salons’ funded by Epstein. A literary agent by the name of John Brockman was responsible for organizing many of these salons under the guise of a club called the Edge, which facilitated the gathering of billionaires and academics at “glittering events.” Some of these events were apparently secretive safe spaces for participants to praise “race science, rape culture and genetic engineering.” It was through Brockman’s bragging about his association with Epstein to a former client (tech writer Evgeny Morozov) that details of former Prince Andrew’s alleged foot massage emerged.

The so-called Billionaire’s Dinners and various ‘salons’ seem to have faded away as Epstein’s reputation began to poison the events. I was not involved in any of that, I’m relieved to say; I was on Brockman’s mailing list and was invited to contribute to some of his books of essays, but I was not insider enough to be invited to any of his salons with Pinker. Edge is now described as “cult-like”, so fortunately I did not fall into it. I was only on his list for about a year before I was dropped without fanfare.

Would you believe those dinners were almost entirely funded by Epstein”? Or that Brockman attended a party at Epstein’s mansion to celebrate his release from prison?

Now what about Adam Bly? I heard Brockman describe him as his protege, but have no idea how the Bly-Brockman-Epstein axis formed. There’s a big story lurking here.

It’s lunch hour, on my first day back at full-time work, and I’m thinking about food. I’m in transition; all summer I’ve been mostly at home, in part because I’ve been laid up by knee surgeries and some surgeries, but that excuse doesn’t work any more because I’m mostly recovered. My wife has been working a regular 7-3 workday most days, so I’ve gradually evolved into a house-husband. I do most of the cooking, and also laundry and dishwashing…yeah, you could say I’m whipped. And that’s OK. After years of leaving most of the housework to my wife, I’m gaining a new appreciation of household labor.

One of the things I was thinking about was that I’ve got it pretty easy now, since it’s just me and my wife cooperating to run the house. Two people. Simple. Manageable. But still a real amount of work, and while I enjoy cooking, I don’t enjoy cleaning up the aftermath, even though it must be done.

But then it struck me: my parents had six kids, one after another, and I realized that I didn’t see a sink piled high with dirty dishes until I moved out and lived alone and was a lazy sloppy bachelor. My late mother must have had a system: with as many dirty dishes as 8 people would produce at every meal, she must have been diligent about not letting them accumulate — I had never properly appreciated all the labor my mother must have invested in basic maintenance. Thanks, Mom, I’m sorry I never said so while you were alive.

It also made me appreciate the reason that my parents almost divorced when I was 7 or 8 years old. Mom wanted to get a job outside the home, and Dad reacted with great hostility. He, and the rest of us, were dependent on all that hard work Mom was doing. (They must have figured out how to manage the situation, because they reconciled, and Mom got a part time job at Boeing.)

Remember, though, I was thinking about food, and I was trying to remember what Mom did for dinner. Eight places were set at the table, and she had to provide bowls of food we’d have to pass around and serve ourselves…something. That’s where I drew a blank. What the heck was I eating while growing up?

Maybe you have a better recollection than I do. I was getting mostly forgettable, bland food.

There was a very anthropological distinction between my parents’ roles. Dad did the glamorous, high protein stuff: a big slab of smoked salmon, a beach trip where we’d come back with buckets of clams, barbecue in the summer. But that was an occasional treat, not even every week. Mom would do the basic low-budget, economical stuff every day, which now I’ve mostly forgotten. Lots of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, cereal for breakfast, and potatoes, corn, broccoli, etc. for bulk at dinner, and I recall tuna casserole a few times a week (which was OK, I liked tuna casserole), but probably the most memorable favorite was putti klub, a potato dumpling wrapped around a bit of meat, and then sliced and fried and soaked in maple syrup. We also had a filling stew with root vegetables and mystery meat (I knew exactly what it was, heart or tongue, cheap organ meats, cubed and cooked to be unrecognizable), and sometimes a platter of breaded pork chops, or better still, liver and onions. I used to terrify my kids with threats of serving liver and onions for dinner, because I actually liked it, while they were grossed out at the very idea.

But man, the work involved in making meals for 8 people every day, and doing it on a very tight budget–I couldn’t do that.

Now you might be thinking that I had 3 kids and had to have known the struggle of feeding 5 people every day, but I don’t. I remember cans and boxes from the grocery store, and that’s about it. Maybe I could ask them what they remember, but I think they all died of malnutrition, kwashiorkor, beriberi, rickets, and scurvy, and even if they had survived, wouldn’t have good memories of family meals.

How about you? Do you have fond memories of good food on the table?