by Jeff McMahonMy old man taught me to say “so long” whenever we parted because he contended “goodbye” should be reserved for permanent occasions, like the one Emily Dickinson refers to here: Good-by to the life I used to live,And the world I used…
July 2010
The Senate’s abandonment of climate legislation, confirmed last night, is not a victory of Republicans over Democrats, business over government, skeptics over believers. It’s a failure of capitalism, above all, and a failure of capitalism’s…
No sooner had oil stopped gushing into the Gulf of Mexico–if only temporarily–than a campaign was underway to convince Americans to buy Gulf seafood, now that everything is “back to normal.”
Engineered by the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing…
For more than three months, up to 15 cameras have fed Americans live video of BP’s oil-spill disaster from nearly a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico. The metaphor was not hard to catch–instead of fueling planes, trains, and automobiles, the gushing…
Why does The Economist have not only anonymous scribes, but anonymous bloggers? Perhaps so they can be refreshingly honest.
There’s no taint of political correctness, no whiff of sympathy, in the latest offering in the paper magazine by their…
Don’t believe in global warming? There’s a backup disaster.
Even without the threat of climate change, economic disaster looms for businesses that fail to switch from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources, the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London…
Berkeley linguist to Democrats: talk to America like it’s a 5-year-old.
That’s not what George Lakoff says, exactly, but it’s what he does in a sample editorial he wrote to teach progressives how to convey their message more effectively to the…
The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new rules today regulating power-plant pollution that crosses state lines.
Gina McCarthy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator for air and radiation, is holding…
Chicagoans know they can count on a few things when the weather turns fair in summer: hundreds of thousands will flock to the Lakefront, live bands will play at lunchtime on State Street corners, farmers will haul fresh produce into town for the…
The U.S. Supreme Court has been busy in its laboratory in 2010, creating a new class of citizen with dynamic new powers. At first, it seemed that citizen might be the corporation, but recently we’ve learned more about what the court has in mind.
When…
