![]() ![]() ![]() In an embarrassing incident from his own “Forbidden Twitter File,” Tyson recalls, he posted a tweet pointing out that mass shootings represent “a tiny fraction of all preventable deaths in the country … within days of the 2019 El Paso, Texas shooting, in which 46 people were shot in a Walmart, 23 of them killed.” The social media pounding that Tyson received “for my insensitivity to the victims and their loved ones” was a reminder of a similar backlash, before the Twitter era, after he compared the death toll on 9/11 to the number of Americans who die in traffic accidents every month. In other places, however, he exhibits some self-awareness that real-world headlines aren’t always best met with slide rules and scientific calculators. In some of the book’s most fanciful passages, Tyson proudly lets his nerd flag fly, imagining what visitors from space would make of our social divisions and holding up Comic-Con, the annual gathering of comic book aficionados, as a model of social community. ![]()
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