what killed the dinosaurs (maybe volcanoes?)

I. The Coldest Case Possible What Killed the Dinos?
This article has been popping up everywhere the last week or so, and for good reason. Maybe an asteroid didn't kill the dinosaurs? Whether you care about this or not, we at least get to hear about scientists at their petty, political worst.

According to this well-established fire-and-brimstone scenario, the dinosaurs were exterminated when a six-mile-wide asteroid, larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs. The impact unleashed giant fireballs, crushing tsunamis, continent-shaking earthquakes, and suffocating darkness that transformed the Earth into what one poetic scientist described as “an Old Testament version of hell.”

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom.

II. Conspiracies Are Fun, Almost as Fun As This Article 

If the Jersey Devil legend has survived, it is not because the facts bear it up. It is because the creature is New Jersey. If there is a more unclassifiable and more mismatched organism than something with a horse’s head and a dragon’s wings, it is the Garden State. Home to mobsters, millionaires, and bog farmers, it breeds celebrity monsters for every age. Its veneer of McMansions and strip malls seems inescapable until you realize how tenuous the veneer is. Stray just a little from Bergen County’s estates, and you fall into a cauldron of oddity, from roadside rodeos to the worn-out perma-carnivals of Atlantic City, to the lonely clapboard houses and colonial ghosts deep in the pinelands. And underneath all that are the Pine Barrens themselves, the primeval aquifer feeding all New Jersey’s native witchcraft.

III. Thankful for a Ross Macdonald Revival
Ross Macdonald wrote fiction along the lines of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but his unending association with both has undermined his own reputation. He's great, and apparently also had a sad life which likely influenced his work's ability to investigate so doggedly the nature of people in need. All kinds of people, too. Detective fiction lasts, I think, not just because it has the easiest and most enjoyable plot tropes, but because the project of the detective is to unravel another person's interior world. That's basically what's unique to fiction (arguably): interiority unfiltered in a way film and television can't imitate.

Macdonald’s singular vision of the fragile qualities of justice and mercy was a hard-earned one. In 1959, Macdonald’s daughter Linda Millar disappeared from her dormitory at a private college and became the subject of a high-profile missing persons case. This effect of this incident on Macdonald is documented in Karen Huston Karydes’s study of the era’s crime canon, Hard-Boiled Anxiety. Karydes examines the roots of the anxieties that throb throughout Macdonald’s novels, as well as those of his partners in the holy trinity of hard-boiled crime, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

IV. Opinion
The best type of film will always be film noir - so many exist and with such great directors, great actors, great technical work. Touch of Evil, The Big Sleep, Laura, Rear Window - I mean, what other sub-category of film can even compete? War dramas? Biographies? Musicals? Not even westerns. 

It's unbeatable. Supreme. And in recent years we've gotten literary-noir adaptations like Winter's Bone adding to the reputation. Or, if not its reputation, its legacy. Killing people in black and white, I guess I'm saying, is the height of 20th-century artistic expression.

So. That's humanity, I guess. Happy living to you and yours.