Before I retire from teaching, I wonder if I’ll be able to teach a course called “Lost Environments,” where I tell students about what were once coastal ecosystems that are now under water because of our headlong rush into climate change? I can show lots of pictures of the Everglades and Bangladesh and Louisiana and […]
Month: December 2011
So you’ve probably seen something about Paul Kane’s “Sell Taiwan” op-ed in the New York Times; effectively, Kane’s suggestion would mean that the US would guarantee non-i
…can only exist in Ron Capshaw’s head, and only then because he really wants it to. Case in point: Kael herself had briefly flirted with Stalinism while in college, but soon rejected it be
Americans’ have shaped narratives to make the Founding Fathers fit any number of political ideologies since at least the 1830s. It is a national passion to build connections between one’s own political beliefs and what some guys thought 200 years ago. So when I read a piece like Lauren Simenauer claiming that Benjamin Franklin is […]
Natalia Antonova (who in full disclosure is a former editor of mine) on making the decision to default on her student loan debt, even though it will screw her over for life. Essentially, it became a c
Naomi Wolf has a more than 5,000 word non-defense-defense of her initial assertion that the crackdown on OWS was ordered by Congress and authorized by the White House. Since she still has no evidence
Apparently wide swaths of the US public approve of the use of nuclear weapons in non-retaliatory circumstances. Randomly selected groups of survey respondents were told that the nuclear and conventional attacks would either be equally effective or that the nuclear attack had a greater chance of success. Everything else was held constant. When both options […]
Herman Cain still not running for president. Some upcoming stops on his book tour will apparently be cancelled. …Jamelle has the slightly longer version.
Jeffrey Loria. And damn right I hold a grudge.
In a beautifully produced book from University of North Carolina Press, Stanley Riggs and his associates review what they call “The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast.” By this, they mean the constant struggle to maintain the Outer Banks against threats including climate change, rising sea levels, powerful storms, and the development that imperils the regional […]
DeLong asks something I’ve been wondering about — why doesn’t Clegg just pull the plug on the unpopular government that is completely destroying the British economy by implementing t
Katie Roiphe. The bad Bush-era standup routine without a punchline about her recent discovery that there are cranks on the internet is bad enough in isolation, but combined with her recent arguments a