A Gilded Planet

There's terror in the air once again. Guns, terrorist sleeper cells, metastasizing civil war in the Middle East, a new season of Game of Thrones that could disappoint fans. 1 There are ordinary decent citizens asking: what's next? Must I buy a gun to protect myself? 2 Right now, in this country, we've got liberals terrified of the endless stream of mass shootings, and conservatives arming themselves to the teeth because they're terrified of terrorists who suddenly seem to be encroaching with unimaginable rapidity on the West. So what are we to do? A lot of religious folks out there see guns as a kind of balm against the fearsome and devilish world out there. 3 But there are plenty of scientists and followers of the scientific path who feel the same way. Likewise regarding those of us with a disdain for guns: you'll talk to believers and non-believers alike who feel we need to have fewer guns in fewer hands, or no guns in no hands at all. There's no single p...

Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in the 1970s to describe the unit in cultural evolution that corresponds to the "gene" familiar in biological evolution. For Dawkins, a meme referred to both ideas and the physical, behavioral and social manifestations of ideas. Like genes, memes replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. This happens through various forms of cultural transmission: writing, speech, gesture, music, image - pretty much anything imitable or reproducible. In recent years, the term "meme" has entered common parlance with a different meaning than that designated by Dawkins and his academic colleagues and acolytes. The new meaning is related yet distinct from that used first in the 1970s. The phrase "internet meme" generally refers to a new breed of inside joke that spreads via the Internet. The most recognizable example is a funny image accompanied by a pithy caption rendered in a bulbous font. I am going to suggest...