Like the POTUS, I would also like to know what people think the utility of calling it "radical Islam" is, other than giving people a shoddy excuse to discriminate against, beat up, or kill Muslims or people they think are Muslims.

While Donald Trump harangues President Obama for refusing to label the Orlando gunman a "radical Islamic terrorist" and Hillary Clinton undermines the president by repeatedly using the term herself, it seems more and more like it's not particularly warranted.

There are significant differences between Islamists and Muslims and conflating the two is a major category error.

Improved mental health access is often touted in the wake of mass shootings, often in lieu of any meaningful anti-gun proliferation efforts.

The sad thing is that if you think about it, white supremacy has been the concept of what it means to be American since before the beginning. Even in the early 20th century some types of white people were considered unassimilable. This didn't really change until the 1960s which saw the (almost) complete legalization of the citizenship of people of color. But I'm certain lots of Americans still think people of color are unassimilable.

The way I look at it, Islamism has as much to do with Islam as scientism has to do with science. (And before you argue that scientism never killed anybody, the victims of Social Darwinism and eugenics would probably beg to differ.)

I just watched a sweet, low-key film called "Infinity" that stars Matthew Broderick as the renown physicist Richard Feynman and Patricia Arquette as his first wife Arline Greenbaum. Despite the fact that it covers the period of time when Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project, it is mostly really a love story.

I don't remember the last time I wept tears of joy. Tonight—even though I have 16 days left—I felt that, at the last, it was truly, finally, over.

I once had a dream about blogging, being irritated with the emergency department, and the planet Pluto. Somehow these elements randomly came together tonight for no particular reason, and I got this eerie feeling that somehow I can dream about the future. This isn’t the first time this has occurred, and it’s not just some déjà vu weirdness. Unfortunately, my dreams about the future are never useful.

I never used to do this, but I guess my latent type A personality is coming out in bits and pieces. I write these things out like some kind of incantation to ward off bad luck and evil spirits. You would think it would make me more productive, but I promptly lose them, forcing me to rewrite them over and over again.