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Annie Dillard Was a Real One: The Woman Who Understood That Seeing the World Is Not the Same as Understanding It

Annie Dillard spent her life examining the extraordinary mysteries hiding inside ordinary existence. Her passing reminds me that the greatest writers don't simply teach us how to read the world. They force us to confront how little of it we've actually bothered to see. There is something profoundly unsettling about losing a writer who spent her entire life reminding us that everything was temporary in the first place. It's almost as though death, that arrogant bastard, decided to interrupt a conversation about its own inevitability. And in the case of Annie Dillard, the irony is particularly cruel because few writers understood the strange relationship between life, suffering, beauty, and mortality quite like she did. Annie Dillard died on September 15, 2026, at the age of 81. The world lost a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, an extraordinary essayist, a fearless intellectual, and a woman who possessed the increasingly endangered ability to look at something ordinary and reco...
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Collateral Damage: The War on DEI in Science Takes a Toll


Welcome to the latest episode of "2025: The Sequel No One Asked For." This season, in the ongoing saga of America's political theater, the science community finds itself playing the unwitting role of the villain. Yes, folks, science—the same discipline that brought you life-saving vaccines, the internet, and, oh, I don’t know, modern civilization—is now under attack for being too "woke." Enter Ted Cruz and his merry band of Senate Republicans, who recently dropped a list of nearly 3,500 NSF-funded research projects they deem ideological poison.

Act I: The "Woke" Inquisition In what feels like a crossover between "House of Cards" and "The Crucible," Senate Republicans have flagged these grants as the unholy trinity of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) research. What heinous acts of wokeism are scientists committing, you ask? Darren Lipomi’s research on helping throat cancer patients recover faster from radiation therapy, for one. Because nothing screams "Neo-Marxist class warfare" quite like rehabilitative medical devices.

Act II: The Science Witch Hunt Let’s talk about how this list was created. The committee used a programming tool to sift through 32,000 grant descriptions for 699 keywords. Keywords like “gender,” “ethnicity,” and “sexuality”—you know, the kind of radical concepts that help us understand human biology and social behavior. The methodology here is about as scientific as using a Ouija board to write NIH funding proposals.

Act III: When Science Is Political—But Not Like That Cruz and company argue that research should focus on "curing cancer" and not "bean counting to satisfy the political agenda of Washington Democrats." Newsflash: Research isn’t a menu where you just pick “cancer” and voilà! The diversity components that Cruz finds so offensive are often the very mechanisms ensuring that scientific breakthroughs benefit all Americans—not just a select few.

Act IV: Fear and Loathing in Academia If the goal was to strike fear into the hearts of researchers, mission accomplished. Early-career scientists like Shumpei Maruyama are now left wondering if their studies on climate change’s impact on coral reefs are the scientific equivalent of wearing a “Kick Me” sign. The impact isn’t just professional; it’s existential. Researchers are questioning whether they belong here at all.

Act V: The Real "Collateral Damage" Let’s be real: This isn’t just about stopping “woke” research. It’s about controlling the narrative, gutting funding, and, ultimately, keeping certain voices out of the room. It’s about ensuring that science reflects a narrow worldview, not the diverse tapestry of human experience.

Conclusion: The Science of Survival The irony is rich: By attempting to de-woke-ify science, this campaign may end up making American research weaker, less competitive, and, frankly, dumber. But hey, maybe that’s the point. After all, a less educated populace is far easier to govern—especially when you’re selling snake oil instead of science.

Stay tuned for the next episode of "2025: The Sequel No One Asked For," where we might learn that the only safe research is measuring the viscosity of Ted Cruz’s hair gel.

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