Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Christopher Carson
The Word Before the Words: Recursion, the Piraha, and the Settlement of a Quarrel that was Misframed from the Start
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... I. A bird on the bench In a laboratory in Tübingen a few years ago, a carrion crow was shown a row of colored brackets and asked, in effect, to copy their pattern. The pattern was recursive, brackets nested inside brackets in the way a human reader meets when a sentence folds one clause inside another, as in the man who saw the dog that chased the cat. Children manage this with some effort. Macaque monkeys, given the comparable task, mostly did not.
The Survival of Tricksters at the Edge of Human Life
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... In David Mamet’s film, The Edge, there is a quiet scene that passes, for most viewers, as a moment of local color. A group of wealthy visitors has arrived at a remote Alaskan lodge to sample the wilderness without quite relinquishing the amenities of civilization. On the wall hangs a carved Cree paddle.
The Practice of Address: Loneliness and the Machines That Answer
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... There is a moment in Cast Away when the joke has already ceased to be a joke. The volleyball, at first no more than an accident of blood, paint, need, and improvisation, has acquired a face, a name, and a place in the castaway’s moral universe. Wilson is ridiculous only from the safe distance of society.
Monuments to Its Own Magnificence
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Venice gave Europe a way of hearing architecture. In San Marco, sound entered a building already prepared to answer it. Galleries, choir lofts, vaults, stone chambers, and pools of resonant air shaped the musical act from within. The basilica became an acoustic intelligence. A note sung there acquired distance, origin, and destiny; it seemed to travel through a sacred geography before arriving at the ear.
How America Learned to Let Art Happen
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Wandering the American galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, I found myself following an internal guide in place of chronological obedience or the scholarly discipline of the wall labels. Certain paintings drew me forward, others repelled me gently, and a few exerted a gravitational pull strong enough to reorder everything I thought I was seeing around them.
Intrinsic DNA codes govern distinct modes of nucleosome-transcription factor interactions
Abstract The interplay between transcription factors (TFs) and nucleosomes is central to gene regulation, yet most studies adopt a protein-centric perspective that largely overlooks DNA sequence contributions. Here, we identify four distinct nucleosomal DNA classes, including the canonical WW/SS pattern (W = A/T, S = G/C). All four nucleosome types are widespread across the human genome both in vivo and in vitro.
The Sinister Theology of the Homesman (or, the American West Without a Gospel)
The Western as a Carrier of Redemption Even the more severe American westerns retain a buried structure of moral possibility. They depict violence, exhaustion, and accumulated wrongdoing, and yet they continue to assume that something within the human person may still be reclaimed. What is striking is not that they say so, but that they say so under the harshest conditions the genre can devise, as though to prove the framework precisely where it should fail.
The Horns of Elfland Faintly Blowing
The splendour falls on castle walls ___________And snowy summits old in story: ______The long light shakes across the lakes, ___________And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
Strange Mercies: Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and the Legibility of Grace
Graham Greene described his vocation as the exploration of “the dangerous edge of things.” Flannery O’Connor, who had less patience with euphemism, said that she wrote about “the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”[1] The two formulations are not interchangeable, and the difference between them is the subject of this essay; but they converge upon a single conviction, which is that grace, when it consents to appear in fiction at all, appears as an interruption.
The Regal Anxieties of Anthony Van Dyck
Illusions are by their nature sweet. —Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close), Dangerous Liaisons (dir. Stephen Frears, 1988) – The day after last Thanksgiving brought with it onto the National Mall in Washington, D.C. a cold wind of the most rebuking sort, the kind that carries no hint of romance or pre-Christmas charm. My brother Jonathan and I had misjudged it badly.
Illusion-dwellers from Talos IV to Shakespeare
Illusions are by their nature sweet. —Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close), Dangerous Liaisons (dir. Stephen Frears, 1988) – – Two Captains of the Enterprise The most startling detail in Star Trek’s TOS “The Menagerie” (1966) is not Spock’s courtroom mutiny, nor Kirk’s weighing of law and loyalty, but the statute invoked at the outset: Talos IV is the only planet in all the galaxy whose mere visitation carries a mandatory death penalty.
Flypaper Hearts: Attachment, Grief, and the Limits of Autonomy
Foreword: Christmas and the Intransigence of Attachment It is Christmas Day as I write this, which is perhaps the least neutral moment in the calendar to reflect on human attachment. No other season so reliably exposes the distance between what we tell ourselves about autonomy and what we actually live. Christmas concentrates expectation: reconciliation and warmth, continuity, the presence of those who ought to be present. When those expectations are unmet, the disappointment is existential.
Catastrophic Daughters
Certain stories turn on the loss of a daughter, and when they do, the event reverberates far beyond plot. The wound rarely concerns the child alone. It unsettles memory, identity, and the parent’s sense of moral coherence. The daughter becomes the axis upon which an entire former world once turned. In the HBO series Westworld (2016-2022) the humanoid robot “host” Maeve Millay, played with deep emotional range by English actress Thandiwe Newton, has finally awakened to her artificial nature.
Social Death in English Renaissance Drama
For the dramatists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, revenge meant payback and proof of existence at once. Their tragedies—those bleak, baroque plays of the English Renaissance—were laboratories for testing how a person endures after being stripped of recognition. The earliest revenge plays are obsessed with bureaucracy and erasure as much as with blood and vengeance.
Against Heteronormativity: The Epistemological Case for a Classical Anthropology of Sex and Gender
I was just wandering through the Art Institute of Chicago with the Catholic Bishop of Toledo, Daniel Thomas. Not the bishop himself, of course, but his recent pastoral letter on gender, “The Body Reveals the Person,” open on my phone while I drifted between impressionist seascapes and late medieval altarpieces. The juxtaposition was accidental but apt. On the second floor around me were the “European art before 1900” canvases where form and color were anything but arbitrary.
Ghostlier Demarcations: Strand and Stevens at the World-Edge of Discovery
The voyage from the Philippine Islands to America can be called the longest and most terrible of all in the world, because of the immense ocean to cross, which is almost half the globe, with the wind always against it, and the incredible and terrible storms that occur there. —Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, Italian adventurer, 1698 The Black Ship enters Manila Bay in 1565, sails blackened by the Pacific crossing.
Nature to Advantage Dressed
I recently rewatched Season Two of Downton Abbey, in which the good-natured heir to the estate, Matthew Crawley, returns home on leave from the Great War. He is still intact then, not yet broken by what will later befall him at the Somme, but already marked by the experience in ways his family can sense without naming. He is welcomed, naturally, with warmth and ceremony, seated again at the long table under the family portraits, restored for the moment to Edwardian continuity.
The Still Point of the Turning World
Thus times do shift, thus times do shift. Each thing its time must hold. New things succeed, new things succeed, as former things grow old. – —from “Candlemas Eve,” by Kate Rusby, 2008[*] One of the quiet miracles of the contemporary folk revival is that, on rare occasions, it produces a song that does not merely reference the past but seems to remember it from within.
The Virgin’s Winter Guest: The Catastrophic Grace of Renaissance Devotional Music
They came on stage looking almost too young for the weight of what they were about to do, this little Rose Ensemble that had drifted into Milwaukee at Advent for a performance of Renaissance choral motets. The performances were of course “a cappella” (without instruments), as originally composed by the geniuses of early modern European devotion.
The Holy Road To Market
A visitor to the Art Institute of Chicago can move, in a few paces, from Francisco de Zurbarán’s crucified Christ to Constant Troyon’s The Road to Market, and in that short walk traverse two very different ways in which holiness enters the world.
That Dolphin-torn, that Gong-tormented Venice
Yesterday I walked into a gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago and ran straight into a problem of history disguised as a problem of style. On one wall hung Francesco Guardi’s Piazza San Marco with the Basilica and Campanile, painted around 1775 to 1780, the whole square breathing in a warm, restless light, the campanile a thin reddish shaft that seems to tremble against a thick, worked sky, the crowd broken into quick flicks of pigment wandering over the stones.
The Blood on the Snow: Duels, Masquerades, and the Solitude of Misbegotten Passion
You stand in Chicago, in front of Gérôme’s Duel after the Masquerade, and you realize you have seen this man die before. He is sprawled in white on the snow, head lolling, a smear of red at the chest. His companions huddle around him in horror. The victors retreat into the frozen trees. A sword lies abandoned in the foreground, like a sentence that has reached its full stop.
La Danse Doree’: Bruegel’s Village Dance, Michael Praetorius, and Europe’s Last Coherent Calendar
It is tempting, and distinctly modern, to look at Pieter Bruegel’s Peasant Dance and conclude that religion has receded, leaving behind a purely secular scene of rustic exuberance. The Medieval dancers surge, stamp, clasp, and sway with an assurance that seems bodily rather than devotional. And yet this apparent absence is misleading, because the sacred in Bruegel’s village is suffused within its themes.
On Grace in Given Light
The Naturals in “The New World” (New Line Cinema, 2005) Thomas Aquinas is already a theologian of “given light,” he just doesn’t use the phrase. For him there are three great illuminations. First, the lumen naturale rationis—the natural light of reason—by which any human being, pagan or Christian, can grasp the basic structures of reality: that things exist, that causes are ordered, that certain acts fulfill our nature and others degrade it.
What Quintessence of Dust? American Masculinity from the Frontier to Conscience
All cultures organize their self-understanding around a single radiant virtue. For the Greeks it was beauty, for the Romans lawful order, for the English propriety, and for Asian societies, harmony. But for Americans it has always been freedom: fierce, generous, and frequently self-destructive. No other people has so completely equated existence with choice or moral worth with self-direction.
The Still Point of the Baroque Musical World was the Eucharist
In October of 2022, I attended Mass at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where the choir sang Palestrina’s “Videntes stellam.” The motet opens with that human exhalation, videntes stellam, magi gavisi sunt, “when they saw the star, the Magi rejoiced.” The phrase is passed from voice to voice, first like the earth crying upward, then like heaven itself echoing back the line on the downbeat, as if the angels were singing in response. In those opening bars, sound seems to shuttle between realms.
The Tyranny of the Generic: Against Semantic Flattening in Biblical Studies
Introduction: The Modern Bias Against Distinction A peculiar paradox haunts modern historical-critical scholarship. In its laudable pursuit of objectivity, it often adopts a methodology that imposes its own distinctly modern, and often egalitarian, categories onto ancient worldviews.
The Razor and the Rose: Ockham, Nominalism, and the Long Decoherence of the Medievals’ Eucharistic World
When the day of wrath shall come, what shall become of me? — from the Dies Irae, 13th century sequence Prologue: The Unbinding of the World It begins innocuously enough, with a monk and a magnifying glass. Umberto Eco’s 1984 novel The Name of the Rose opens not with murder, but with a kind of epistemic excursion: a skeptical inquisitor in the habit of a Franciscan friar.
Anthropology’s Haunted Mirror: Western Fantasy and Native Resilience
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin, often quoted by anthropologists as both confession and warning. A stone-age tribe that never existed, a rainforest people caught in a Cold War crossfire, and a Western anthropologist’s dream of sexually carefree Polynesian teens have a surprising amount in common.
Three Ulysses: Curiosity, Grace, and Defiance
Ulysses and the Sirens (Herbert James Draper, 1909) Among the many masks worn by the Western hero, none is more enduring or malleable than Ulysses. From the Homeric sea-captain to the symbolist, the skeptic, and finally the shattered ego of the modernist imagination, he embodies not one ideal but a series of competing postures toward knowledge, experience, death, and the divine. In his ancient form, Odysseus was clever, long-suffering, and reluctant to abandon hearth and home.
Saddest Devotion: Sir Anthony Hopkins and Romantic love in Middle Age
Part I: Eros at the Twilight Hour In the spring of 2025, the internet turned its gaze toward an unlikely object of romantic scandal: 73-year-old former NFL coach Bill Belichick and his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson. The age disparity, more than the relationship itself, became the target of ridicule across social media platforms.
There Is an Island in the Dark: Shakespeare’s Tempest, Contemporary AI, and Our Future
Miranda (John William Waterhouse, 1916) Perhaps Shakespeare’s The Tempest, far from being a romantic fable about fathers, daughters and future husbands, is really a case-study in power politics. If it is, as some have argued, is it also an accidental allegory for artificial intelligence governance?
The Sixth Disposition: “Honesty-Humility” and the Architecture of Virtue
The Sixth Disposition: “Honesty–Humility” and the Architecture of Virtue This essay examines the “Honesty–Humility” factor of the HEXACO model as a psychologically measurable and quantifiable analogue to classical moral predispositions.
Echoes of Reason: Ape Minds in a Thomistic Cosmos — Christopher Carson, J.D., M.A.
Jamie Lee Curtis: Yes they do they just don’t understand it! Recent studies revealing complex communication in primates, recursive vocalizations in orangutans, sign language in gorillas and chimpanzees, and lexigram use in bonobos, have reignited debates about the uniqueness of human language and rationality. Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics, this article argues that such behaviors, while impressive, do not bridge the ontological gap between human and animal cognition.
The Law of Large Numbers, Bayesian Bias, and the Strange Case of 3I/ATLAS: How Rubin Observatory’s…
The Law of Large Numbers, Bayesian Bias, and the Strange Case of 3I/ATLAS: How Rubin Observatory’s New Data on an Interstellar Visitor Still Leaves Room for the Artificial Hypothesis…for One of Them. In the wake of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s new observations of 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1), the astronomical community has begun to coalesce around a natural interpretation: a small comet with a retrograde orbit and mildly peculiar photometric behavior.
That Strain Again, It Had a Dying Fall: An Elegy in Four Movements for the English Soul
There are moments in the life of a civilization that seem lit from behind: not by divine fire or prophetic vision, but by the quiet, impossible coherence of everything being briefly in its right place. Such was the Edwardian moment: a sliver of historical sunlight resting between the Victorian dusk and the thunderheads of the Great War. Its novels are full of bicycles and drawing rooms, of rectors and music teachers, of high tea and suppressed desire.
The Anamnesis of Literary Memory
The Christian imagination, particularly as it reaches maturity in Thomistic metaphysics, regards memory neither as a mental scrapbook nor a purely emotional archive. Rather, memory is a theological organ—a mode by which the soul engages time in view of eternity. It is the inward echo of divine plenitude in the finite frame of human life. It is, in Aquinas’s idiom, a power of the soul, shaped by grace and ordered toward beatitude. This essay is a meditation on the recovery of that vision.
The Shrinking Present: Chunking, Aging, and the Machinery of Time
The Shrinking Present: Chunking, Aging, and the Machinery of Time — -Christopher S. Carson, J.D., M.A. June 2025 I. The Phenomenon There is no clock quite so treacherous as the one embedded in the human mind. Ask the aged to recount their childhood, and you’ll hear about summer days that lasted forever. Ask them about the last ten years, and you’ll hear only silence or blur. Days once long now flash by. Weeks collapse into a blink. This subjective acceleration of time is not a mere poetic fancy.
Against Epistemic Frivolity: Karl Popper and the Restoration of Objectivity
Against Epistemic Frivolity: Karl Popper and the Restoration of Objectivity — Christopher S. Carson, J.D., M.A. June 2025 The recent death of Bruno Latour, celebrated by the academic commentariat with a kind of reverent exuberance, offers an occasion for reflection: just not, perhaps, the kind Latour’s admirers intended.
A Ghost of Intellect: How a code-evolving AI agent approximates the human appetite for truth
A Ghost of Intellect: How a code-evolving AI agent approximates the human appetite for truth — Christopher S. Carson, J.D., M.A. May 2025 AlphaEvolve is an evolutionary coding agent released last month and developed by Google DeepMind. Its purpose is functional: improve algorithms through structured iteration. It rewrites code segments, evaluates their performance against defined benchmarks, and retains those that score well.
After Move 37: Denial Psychology in Homo Sapiens By Christopher S. Carson, J.D., M.A. June 2025
After Move 37: Denial Psychology in Homo Sapiens By Christopher S. Carson, J.D., M.A. June 2025 In March 2016, something quietly epochal happened in a glass-walled auditorium in Seoul. A 33-year-old Korean master named Lee Sedol sat across from an inanimate black monolith known as AlphaGo: an artificial intelligence program designed by Google DeepMind to play the most complex strategic game humans have ever invented.
The Scandinavian Art of Relinquishment
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Street in Røros (Harald Sohlberg, 1902) I. The Scandal in the Palace Watching Gladiator II not long ago, I found myself arrested less by the violence than by what we are asked to feel about it. The film wants for the tragic grandeur of its predecessor, but it contains one scene that outlives the spectacle around it.
Did These Photons Know the Future? Inside the Quantum Experiment That Defies Time.
Did These Photons Know the Future? Inside the Quantum Experiment That Defies Time. By Christopher S. Carson, J.D., M.A. “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” — Albert Einstein There’s something quietly astonishing happening in Julia Mossbridge’s laboratory. Not just quantum strangeness (we’ve grown used to that) but something more unsettling. Her photons seemed to know the future.
Chase et al v. American Bankers Insurance Company of Florida
July 19, 2023 Filing 2 Notice of Case Assignment to Magistrate Judge Jeff Armistead and Discovery and Pretrial Scheduling Order. Discovery is to be completed by 11/16/2023. Joint Alternate Dispute Resolution Report is due by 12/18/2023. Pretrial Order is due by 12/18/2023. Ordered by Magistrate Judge Jeff Armistead. (sb) July 19, 2023 Filing 1 Notice of Removal of Case Number 23CV27070 from Multnomah County Circuit Court. Filing Fee in amount of $402 collected. Agency Tracking ID: AORDC-9016803 issued.
Bilir et al v. American Security Insurance Company
March 28, 2023 Filing 1 Complaint. Filing fee in the amount of $402 collected. Agency Tracking ID: AORDC-8872857 Jury Trial Requested: Yes. Filed by Eda Bilir, Russell Messner against American Security Insurance Company (Attachments: #1 Civil Cover Sheet, #2 Proposed Summons). (Bonaparte, Robert)
Probiotics, not antibiotics, might be the future of livestock farming
Photo by Amber Kipp on Unsplash Probiotics are an attractive alternative to longstanding farming practice, and could help us build a better food system Alice Theibault Environmental Science and Biotechnology Rochester Institute of Technology September 18, 2019 Livestock farmers are always looking for ways to keep their animals healthy and help them grow bigger and faster to meet demand.
Opinion: Face it - the future is Uber
Uber is in crisis mode. Yet the business model created by Uber and used by other companies — including Lyft, Via and SideCar — is here to stay. For example, Google parent Alphabet is pouring $1 billion into supporting Lyft. Numerous scandals are turning Uber into what’s called the “tech industry’s biggest troublemaker.” In June, Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick was forced to resign amid accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination, among other lawsuits.
The Future Is Uber – InsideSources
Uber is in crisis mode. Yet the business model created by Uber and used by other companies — including Lyft, Via and SideCar — is here to stay. For example, Google parent Alphabet is pouring $1 billion into supporting Lyft. Numerous scandals are turning Uber into what’s called the “tech industry’s biggest troublemaker.” In June, Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick was forced to resign amid accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination, among other lawsuits.
Knowing What Drone Rules You Need to Follow - Made Simple
This article is meant solely for new drone pilots or people thinking about buying a drone. If you are considered a professional, then you need not read this. These are things you most likely already know. Once upon a time, in a dark and unruly land, there lay an organization of fun blockers. These fun blockers later became known as the FAA. The FAA was responsible for everything that flew in the air. Then one day, a new flying machine came into the land. They dubbed this machine the drone.
ISIS is spreading in Libya like a disease
Why not share your impressions — and those of residents of foreign countries about the United States — with Trib readers in 150 words? Like a cancer, ISIS has spread from the Middle East to Libya and begun the process of seizing oil fields and terrorizing the populace. Just last week, an ISIS car suicide bomber detonated himself at a checkpoint near Libya's third largest city of Misrata, murdering five soldiers. ISIS live-tweeted the bombing, declaring that “The apostates of Fajr Libya ...
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Christopher
Contact Christopher, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack