Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to balance California’s budget by padlocking 80 percent of the state’s parks, and that puts environmentalists in a pickle. It’s a fine idea, in theory: nothing would be better for many of California’s natural places…
May 2009
On the one hand, you have federal fisheries agencies that have ignored petitions to enforce Endangered Species Act protections for the leatherback turtle. On the other, you have Suzan Lakhan Baptiste, the “crazy turtle woman” of Trinidad, who…
If 300,000 people die each year because of global warming, as the Global Humanitarian Forum asserts in a report released today, why don’t we hear more about it? The death toll is higher than the body count from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and if…
Last night at the Chicago Cultural Center, Stuart Dybek, a writer who will be remembered as a member of the Chicago canon, recalled growing up in Pilsen, then a gritty immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. In Dybek’s day, the Boys Clubs of…
For as long as I can recall, there has been steady erosion of the notion that humans are different from other animals. No sooner did we point out that we are special because we use tools than an ape used a straw to suck up termites and a bird used a…
Stories about global warming, including my own, have sounded increasingly alarmed in recent months. That’s partly because the November election ripped the duct tape off the mouths of government scientists gagged by the Bush Administration, partly…
As Sonia Sotomayor’s name zipped around the planet this morning, environmental groups checked their dossiers and found almost no information on the Supreme Court nominee, except for one ruling that made them smile. None of them declared her an…
In his review of A Moveable Feast in this month’s Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens discusses the size of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s penis, Ernest Hemingway’s interest in that object, Gertrude Stein’s experience of something suggestive of anal sex, and the…
Sittin on the porch countin squirrels this weekend?
Email those numbers to a Chicago scientist and you can take part in a citizen-science project that has implications not just for the furry tree-dwelling varmints, but for animals and ecosystems…
The circadian clock comes at no extra charge with every human body, and I’m convinced it features an alarm. It works like this: you tell yourself what time you want to wake up–at 7 a.m., say–and then you wake up at 7 a.m. Simple as that.
Only two…
