Archive
This isn’t Sarah Palin’s Alaska
With the holidays upon us again, I think back with both pleasure and distress to the feast I was welcomed to a few seasons ago at the top of Alaska.
New Hope to Stop Violence against Women
The United States has made great strides to change the sickening attitudes and legal obstacles that for decades held women in the grip of physical and sexual violence, far too often with little recourse, while their abusers went unpunished.
End the Pot Prohibition
I have never smoked marijuana, not even a puff. Not ever.
Meet Your New Neighborhood Food Market
Yes, the $400-billion-a-year retail behemoth, with two million employees laboring in 8,500 stores spread around the globe, now is putting on a “local” mask.
Crocodile Tears
Gambling: Upbeat, but Slipping
Casino developers have to plunk down a lot of their own chips these days. Few researchers doubt that risk-taking is hard-wired into a slew of human brains, but at what point does over saturation cause the developer to lose his shirt?
The Lineup: Week of November 29-December 5, 2010
As global climate talks get underway in Cancun, Miriam Pemberton calls for more parity in spending on climate and military security and Diana Bronson warns that “geoengineering” fixes for the world’s climate problems could do far more harm than good.
Spend More on the Climate, Less on the Military
As deserts expand and droughts persist, desperate people begin fighting over the water that remains. Elsewhere, rising sea levels create mass migrations. These portraits of human tragedy caused by climate change have become environmental security threats that the U.S. military now worries about.
Geoengineering is a Recipe for Disaster
Think you’ve heard enough about climate change? Chances are you haven’t heard anything about the dangerous and costly sci-fi climate fixes known as geoengineering.
Trojan Malpractice
It was just a lone sentence tacked on to the very end of a long New York Times article. The story focused on a recent report from President Obama’s bipartisan commission on reducing the national debt. “Panel Seeks Cuts in Social Security and Higher Taxes” was indeed about cuts in Social Security and proposed tax increases–the things most pundits jump on. But the last sentence caught my eye: “[The commission plan] would limit malpractice awards, long a Republican goal.”
