Like many small organisms, fungi are often overlooked, but their planetary significance is outsize. Plants managed to leave water and grow on land only because of their collaboration with fungi, which acted as their root systems for millions of years. Even today, roughly 90 percent of plants and nearly all the world’s trees depend on […]
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Craig Mazin was ready for a change. About a decade ago, Mazin had carved out a solid career as a comedy screenwriter. Though his credits were hardly going to win over critics — “Scary Movie 3” and “Scary Movie 4” as well as the second and third installments of the “Hangover” trilogy, among them — […]
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It’s grim, but in every post-apocalyptic story line, I wait for the moment when the characters float their theories about how the world fell apart, hoping to glean something useful. In HBO’s series “The Last of Us,” survivors of a global pandemic live in harsh, government-controlled quarantine zones to evade a parasitic fungus that turns […]
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Perhaps this is predictable; anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiment is at a boiling point on the right, and as Gamergate showed, conservative video game aficionados are an easily aggrieved lot. Still, I naïvely thought that some conservatives, who frequently complain about not seeing their values represented in pop culture, might thrill to the episode. Yes, it features gay […]
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