Annia Ciezadlo, a talented writer (and a former editor of mine) has just published her first book, which got a glowing review in yesterday’s NYT: There are many good reasons to read “Day of Honey.” It’s a carefully researched tour through the history of Middle Eastern food. It’s filled with adrenalized scenes from war zones,…Continue Reading…
On Sunday, a NYT review of Mark Hertsgaard’s new book on global warming began this way: I haven’t had the talk yet with my kids: my 11-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. I mean the one about global warming, about what’s coming. But then, we grown-ups haven’t had the talk yet among ourselves. Not really. We…Continue Reading…
If you have time for only one long-form journalism story this week, read “The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright in the current issue of the The New Yorker. (The story is not behind a paywall.) Wright’s piece is superb on multiple levels- as a profile of a wayward young man who goes on to become an…Continue Reading…
I don’t know which is more brilliant, the headline, Guns N’ Peas Is Where the Trajectory of Man Began It’s Steady Decline or this passage: Let’s face it. We all know that, thanks to pollution and war and overpopulation, we will eventually end up destroying our species. But the video linked here represents the exact…Continue Reading…
Budiansky writes a killer blog lede: In the geography of politics, there is a strange and shadowy place far, far down the narrowing alleys of the left, where one turns a final corner and is suddenly face to face with like-minded wanderers who arrived at the same spot from exactly the opposite direction, via equally…Continue Reading…
Did Joe Romm ghostwrite Paul Krugman’s column in today’s NYT? Let’s look at the uncanny similarities between Krugman’s op-ed and an argument advanced by Romm in several of his recent posts. For example, Krugman writes today (my emphasis): After all, the big question about uprisings against corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Middle East isn’t…Continue Reading…
Thomas Ricks at Foreign Policy finds some striking similarities between a bird-watching manual and a primer on how to spot bad guys. My old colleagues at Audubon magazine should go to town on this one.
MIT Climate scientist Kerry Emanuel is becoming increasingly outspoken about his alienation from the Republican party. Yesterday, he was interviewed on NPR and he spoke candidly on many of the current hot button topics. Here he is, angst-ridden over the direction of the GOP: I’m very distressed that Republicans, and I have always been a…Continue Reading…
In the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately dept, I see that Fred Pearce is getting worked over by hysterics in the climate sphere. For the record, I’ve already stated several times (at my site) and over at Judith Curry’s blog that Pearce committed a boo-boo no-no in a recent blog post. Deltoid blows this up into “Pearcegate.” Stoat sinks…Continue Reading…
As the saying goes, third time is the charm: Expert consensus grows on contribution of record high food prices to Middle East unrest I have to say, the “status quo” media does come in handy some times. For example, one day “Scientific American jumps the shark,” and another day they are cited prominently in a…Continue Reading…