Shawn Otto
gregladen | April 8, 2017The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, supported by Education Minnesota, ran the 29th annual Minnesota Book Awards ceremony tonight, and Amanda and I were graciously invited by author Shawn Otto and State Auditor and Gubernatorial Hopeful Rebecca Otto to join them at their table. Shawn's wildly popular, and extremely, increasingly relevant book The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It was up for the award in General Nonfiction.
There was a great deal of suspense, as Shawn's category was the very last one of several, and there were several other…
gregladen | June 13, 2016Thinker, writer, and independent scholar Shawn Otto has written an important book called “The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It” (Milkweed Editions, publisher)
Read this book now, and act on what you learn from it, for the sake of your own future and the future of our children and their children.
The rise of modern civilization, from the Enlightenment onward for hundreds of years, was the same thing as the rise of modern science. The rise of science was a cultural novelty with only vague foreshadowing. It was a revolution in the way humans think.…
gregladen | May 10, 2016How about a television series made by some very talented people set in the context of a Renaissance Festival?
That, lords and ladies, is the plan.
Renfest is a serial set in a RenFest, filmed at an actual Renfest, that combines the themes of "office politics," a sort of anachronistic Big-Bang Theory, produced, written, stared in, and developed, by an outstandingly talented team including Shawn Otto (a Renaissance man himself, whom readers of this blog know well), Mary Jo Pehl, Jamal Farah, Dave Allen, and Trace Beaulieu.
The trailer demonstrates that this is an excellent project, and the…
gregladen | May 5, 2016I'm going to publish my full review of The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto closer to the publication date, which is June 7th. (I believe you can use the above link to pre-order the book.) But I just wanted to let you know the book exists, and is amazing, you will want to read it. You will definitely, absolutely, not want to not read it. It is a must read.
This isn't just someone yammering about the lack of respect for science in America, or about the Republican Party's antiscienceosity, etc. Shawn's book is actually a history of…
gregladen | November 20, 2014Shawn otto Shawn is the screenwriter and coproducer of the Oscar-nominated film House of Sand and Fog starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. He has also written for several of film and TV's top studios. A few years back he started Science Debate 08, an effort to get a real debate over science policy issues as part of the presidential debate process. I promise you that all of the presidential campaigns have been aware of this effort, and many have agreed, but never all the candidates in one election. So that's politicians running away from science. (We'll see about 2016.)
Anyway,…
gregladen | October 21, 2014Sins of Our Fathers, by Shaw Otto, is coming out shortly but can be preordered.
JW, protagonist, is a flawed hero. He is not exactly an anti-hero because he is not a bad guy, though one does become annoyed at where he places his values. As his character unfolds in the first several chapters of Shawn Otto's novel, Sins of Our Fathers, we like him, we are worried about him, we wonder what he is thinking, we sit on the edge of our proverbial seats as he takes risk after risk and we are sitting thusly because we learn that he does not have a rational concept of risk. We learn that his inner…
gregladen | February 29, 2012So, it turns out that Heartland was behind the Heartland leak after all.
The evidence seems to suggest that Heartland's Joe Bast wrote a memo, then he and/or Heartland-symp blogger Steven Mosher sent it secretly to Peter Gleick. Peter Gleick then obtained additional material from Heartland, which came to him at his request but all to easily to be explained as a mere oversight on the part of some administrative or secretarial staff. The only thing missing here is evidence that Bast or Mosher or someone suggested to Peter that he verify the memo by asking for related documents from…
gregladen | October 19, 2011
Fool Me Twice
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America" was officially released last night in Minneapolis with appropriate fanfare and celebration. Everyone who gets to know Shawn likes him from the start and quickly learns to respect him and eventually hold him with a certain amount of well-earned awe, and like any book, we've all seen this one coming for quite some time. (I have an old pre-release copy in which every page is "00" but, surprisingly, the front cover is just like the final form.)
Shawn gave a talk at the release party, but since he is held in such high…