He gets flack because he applies that skepticism to mainstream views on Global Warming, which many people insist should not be criticized because it is really really right and ought to be beyond skepticism. I guess time will tell who was right.

I was always a fan of his work. I loved the idea-centric fiction style that he pioneered and that authors like Neal Stephenson still use today.

Most people get their views on global warming from the media, and our media is controlled by corporate interests who profit from being allowed to dump unlimited CO2 into the atmosphere. If people are discouraged from criticizing global warming, it's not because global warming is beyond reproach but because every individual criticism is picked up by the media and given equal credibility to the scientific consensus.

In fact until fifty years ago working class Americans used to read the paper as much or more as upper class Americans. What happened is the papers of the rich started being subsidized by advertisers, so the working class papers couldn't compete and all went out of business. (Ads are worth much more in papers that target the wealthy, so the papers of the wealthy had a bigger ad subsidy, and thus sold for less money at the newsstand than the papers of the working class.) That's why poor people are largely illiterate and uneducated today, whereas only fifty years ago it was the working class that drove the progressive movement.

That sounds like nonsense. If the separate papers appealed to separate demographics, a separate income for one wouldn't affect the sales of the other. If people started switching newspapers they would still be reading so you wouldn't be able to pin to this a disappearance of literacy. The only way this could happen is if newsstands actually dropped certain papers in favor of others, but considering the demographic split, it seems unlikely that this would be possible in all areas.

Even if you grant that this actually happened, it's hard to say that this caused illiteracy rather than the reverse, Considering the shear volume of tabloids, magazines, and newspapers that cater to the relatively illiterate.

Either way, it's a massive generalization and I don't think it holds water.

I know of only one oil company that advertises only on right-leaning blogs and news sites.

What happened is the papers of the rich started being subsidized by advertisers, so the working class papers couldn't compete and all went out of business.

Really? I would think that rich people would be harder to advertise to. If you're in the top 1%, you spend your time around the people you take cues from -- if the New York Times says one thing is cool, and Trey Wellborne the Nth says another, you're going to emulate Trey.

That's why poor people are largely illiterate and uneducated today, whereas only fifty years ago it was the working class that drove the progressive movement.

A more sensible hypothesis is that our economy is better at using smart people than it was fifty years ago. For one thing, fifty years ago, half of the smartest 50% were restricted to working as housewives and secretaries. There are now many more jobs for which a high IQ leads to higher pay -- so the problem isn't that the poor were under-stimulated and thus became dumb; it's that the smart, regardless of stimulation level, didn't stay poor.

While I agree that some of his newer stuff wasn't so good, his older stuff really turned me on to certain fields like archeology, physics, nanotechnology etc. My mouth literally dropped open when I saw the headline.

I wish his family well. :(

I didn't find Prey too interesting though. I'd already known about nanobots and at that point was a professional software developer, so the programming aspect didn't have the same "magical" appeal as the others.

Perhaps if you're already familiar with the area he covered, it doesn't hold as much of an appeal?

A professional historian would not find something like this new at all, so your perspective does matter.

Pretty sad.