There are a lot of heinously unmerited personal attacks going on in these United States right now, but for some reason I’m most bothered by the ones against Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian. As this current Sojourners action alert describes, she’s been targeted by Rush Limbaugh, among others, for her efforts to speak the truth about global warming.Dr. Hayhoe, with one of her inspirations to fight climate change. Partly, these attacks get under my skin because I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for evangelical scientists. My dad is one, and my Intervarsity-linked Bible study in grad school was so full of them that, as often the lone humanities student, I jokingly made up a scientific discipline to fit ... Continue reading →
Out of fashion and proud of it. (Photo by KayVee.INC) It used to be that when I told a fellow progressive I’m a vegetarian, I would get one of three reactions: (1) an enthusiastic “me too!,” (2) a slightly guilty admission of falling off the veg wagon, or (3) a voracious defense of the glories of steak. These days, there’s another increasingly common reaction: People look at me with a mix of pity and confusion, like I’m some holdover from the ’90s wearing a baby-doll dress with chunky shoes and babbling on about No Doubt. I can see what they’re thinking: “You’re still a vegetarian?” At some point over the past few years, vegetarianism went wholly out of style. Now sustainable meat is all the ... Continue reading →
Humanity has weathered many a climate change, from the ice age of 80,000 years ago to the droughts of the late 19th century that helped kill between 30 and 50 million people around the world via famine. But such shifts have transformed or eliminated specific human societies, including the ancient Sumerians and the Ming Dynasty in China, as highlighted in a review paper published January 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Epidemiologist Anthony McMichael of Australian National University surveyed how human societies fared during previous episodes of extreme weather brought on by climate shifts. The big threat is changes to food production, or as McMichael puts it “the drought-famine-starvation nexus.” And we’ve never weathered a climate change so big, so rapid and ... Continue reading →
Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT: THE gratinéed onion soup at Benoit, the French bistro in Midtown Manhattan, was everything you’d imagine it to be: golden crusted and bubbling, gooey and rich, beefy and fragrant. It was also exceedingly messy to eat. My friend, dressed to the nines, wondered aloud as the strings of cheese and onion broth sloshed onto her scarf, “How do people eat this when they’re wearing nice clothes?” That didn’t stop either of us from devouring the stuff down to the last spoonful. But it did make me wonder why I never make French onion soup at home. There, without the self-consciousness I felt at the restaurant, I could tuck a big napkin into my collar and slurp to ... Continue reading →
This was late in 2009, during the first session of ReWired for Life, a program Sohn had conceived of years earlier and devoted herself to building after “The Wire” signed off. She hadn’t been ready to leave the show behind, neither what it stood for nor the Baltimore streets on which it had filmed. It was more than that, though. “I had an extraordinarily strong sense of purpose,” she says, in the same half-purr, half-growl voice familiar to fans of “The Wire.” “My entire life had become about this.”All of which meant little to Daniels, Cornish and Hawkins. It was cool to meet Kima because they had loved the show and loved seeing their reality depicted on screen. And free food was never a bad ... Continue reading →
Most of all, as the president well knows, it’s simply not the case that the typical middle-class American family is severely troubled by a lack of manufactured goods. And if we as a whole aren’t suffering from a shortage of manufacturing outputs, why would we orient our economic structure around making more? The real problems afflicting American families don’t relate to a dearth of manufactured items in the home. The president got at this in his brief remarks on college tuition and his vague allusion to his signature health-care initiative. It is here, rather than in the struggle to manufacture cost-competitive tires, that the American future will be either won or lost. Will the digital revolution that’s transformed publishing and put all the world’s information ... Continue reading →
