Stories by John Horgan

New Year’s Day is approaching, a time when weby which I mean I–brood over past failures and vow to improve ourselves: I will be less judgmental with my kids and more romantic with my girlfriend.

To celebrate Winter Solstice, darkest day of the year, Im posting an edited version of a column I originally wrote for The New York Times more than a decade ago, before I got divorced and moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, from a Hudson Valley hamlet: Garrison, New York.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Murray Gell-Mann’s first paper on quarks, Gell-Mann biographer George Johnson has written several terrific posts about one of the truly great theorists and characters of modern physics

Last week, a friend who knows my views on excessive medical tests and treatments sent me a link to a People magazine cover story about Amy Robach, the correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America.

The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding over recent scientific portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes.* When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the “first Thanksgiving,” in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast [...]

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy, I’m reposting a column about his “Peace Speech,” which he gave less than six months before his assassination: I’m not a big fan of the literary sub-genre of political rhetoric, even the best examples of which usually reduce to schmaltzy, self-aggrandizing propaganda.

For those titillated by Strangelovian fantasies of nuclear apocalypse, the early 1980s were a golden age. That was the height of the Cold War, when nuclear arms and rhetoric escalated, and President Ronald Reagan envisioned a space-based anti-missile “shield”—promptly dubbed “Star Wars” by skeptics—that could thwart attacks by the “Evil Empire,” also known as the [...]

On October 1, ABC reporter Amy Robach received a mammogram on “Good Morning America” to raise awareness of breast cancer, The 40-year-old reporter revealed this week that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer and has elected to undergo a double mastectomy.

Over the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about how “Big Data”—which as far as I can tell is just data mining in a glossy new wrapper–are going to revolutionize science and help us create a better world.* These claims strike me as all too familiar.

My colleagues and I at Stevens Institute of Technology are creating a new program in science communication, and we’ve decided that majors should get a healthy dose of science history.

I’m moving soon, and so I’m riffling through the files I’ve accumulated in my decades as a science writer and chucking those I’ll never (I hope) need.

In my last post, I argued that there is no single, “true” meaning of life, which applies to everyone. The meaning of life is a matter of taste, not of empirical truth.

This post was inspired, in part, by a recent conversation with two friends that followed a familiar pattern. My friends have adopted a Buddhist practice that makes them feel good.

“Here at last!” With this unusual but understandable exuberance, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that it has awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs.

Last spring, I kicked up a kerfuffle by proposing that research on race and intelligence, given its potential for exacerbating discrimination, should be banned.

On Sunday night the television news program 60 Minutes broadcast “Untreated mental illness an imminent danger?” Correspondent Steve Kroft introduces the report by stating: “The mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard two weeks ago that resulted in the deaths of 13 people, including the gunman, was the 23rd such incident in the past seven [...]

My previous post considered whether an antidepressant might have served as a catalyst for a gunman’s massacre of 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last week.

Once again, antidepressants have been linked to an episode of horrific violence. The New York Times reports that Aaron Alexis, who allegedly shot 12 people to death at a Navy facility in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, received a prescription for the antidepressant trazodone in August.

A year ago, on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States, I argued that the U.S. overreacted to these horrific acts of terrorism.

Since the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago, the U.S. and Russia have reduced their nuclear arsenals, and the prospect of a nuclear war has receded from many peoples’ consciousness.

When asked about my style of journalism, I sometimes say that my goal isn’t necessarily to get people to agree with me. It’s to provoke readers into reconsidering some issue.

As of this writing, the U.S. has still not produced definitive, “smoking gun” evidence linking President Basshar al-Assad to a chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds of civilians last week, The New York Times reports today.

It’s the kind of scitech innovation that, when I was a bright-eyed young science writer, made me think, “Cool!” But now stories like “OCD and Optogenetics: Lighting the brain up to shut a behavior down” bring out the curmudgeon in me.

Damn you, Gary Stix! I was just about to head off on a vacation when my old Scientific American buddy sent me an email command: “Attack, John!” Gary’s email linked to a New Republic essay by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker: “Science is Not Your Enemy,” snidely subtitled, “An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, [...]