Susan Glickman

To his many fans, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise embodies the best qualities of twentieth-century humanity projected onto a twenty-fourth-century future. As our representative to other species in the galaxy, he is moral, dignified, compassionate, intelligent, and cultured, all of which is symbolized by his beverage of choice: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” Although the captain grew up in a French…

Throughout the pandemic, it has been common to hear certain anti-vaxxers proclaim their refusal to be used as experimental “guinea pigs” by malevolent scientists. Given how belligerent the most extreme of these folks generally are, it is unlikely that anyone would ­mistake them for the placid, affectionate, and highly social animals that go by that…