Chinese immigrants started settling in America in the mid-1800s, helping fuel the 1849 California Gold Rush and build the Transcontinental Railroad. In this pre-automotive era, these Chinese Americans often settled in dense urban neighborhoods,...
Like many middle-class white kids, I grew up listening to rap artists like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac and the Wu-Tang Clan. One of my favorite 90s raps song is Wu-Tang’s “Triumph”. One the...
I love St. Patrick’s Day in Dallas. Here we celebrate it on the Saturday closest to March 17, with an annual 5k fun run, a parade, and lots of drinking and debauchery. In this...
You may think of conspiracy theorists as pessimistic shut-ins, wearing tinfoil hats and wallowing in paranoia. This isn’t always true, but it’s the stereotype that people have in their heads. In general, non-conspiracy theorists...
I’m a big fan of the Dune series of sci-fi novels. I’ve read them all, including all of Frank Herbert’s originals and the prequels and sequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. So...
I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and as much as I enjoyed the series as a kid, it seems rather dated now. Part of that’s due to the 1980s hairstyles and...
Microsoft is terminating support for Windows XP this spring, 13 years after the operating system first came out. To put that in perspective, it would be like MS-DOS 4.01 (released in 1988) still being...
What if there’s an afterlife, but no God? It’s an idea that’s almost unthinkable in Western religion, though it is accepted in some Eastern religions. When it comes to the supernatural and the divine,...
During my first winter in Texas, I saw signs outside my apartment complex that said, “Freeze Warning: Keep Faucets Dripping”. This came as a surprise to a Michigander like me. Up north, we never...
I was a pretty big nerd as a kid, to put it mildly. After getting a Tandy computer for my 10th birthday, I became a big computer geek throughout my teenage years. Some time...
