I joined True/Slant, the news network pioneered by Lewis Dvorkin and company, in April 2009, a couple of months before its beta launch. I covered environmental news and politics for them until Forbes purchased the site and closed it down in August…
2011
For a lifetime Mary Oliver has gently secluded herself, walked the woods, sent bottles out on the tide bearing simple messages that reconnect humanity to a beauty beyond us. Now we know why.
In an interview with Maria Shriver Mary Oliver reveals she…
It sounds like science fiction: a previously unknown insect with an appetite for electrical circuitry appears at a Houston-area chemical plant and marches toward the Johnson Space Center, defying human attempts to stop it with conventional…
As I hinted in a semi-final post at True/Slant, this forum has found a new home, under a new name and with a new mission, at Forbes. The assignment has changed, appropriate to the developing realities of the politics and economics of carbon. I’ll be…
I left the daily life of journalism at the turn of the Century, just before the daily life of journalism collapsed. That left me feeling a bit like Charlie Chaplin, who sold all his stocks in 1928.
Since then I’ve maintained journalism as a practice…
Conventional nuclear reactors may not be safe enough to operate near cities—if you take Energy Secretary Steven Chu at his word—but small module reactors are "much, much safer," he said at a Pew Environment Group forum in Washington this…
The genius of James Fallows’ new piece in The Atlantic is that he takes some of the best values of traditional journalism—skepticism, research, fairness, eagerness to question authority and topple conventional wisdom—and he applies them to…
Last week when my friend David Alm published his lament of digital publishing in these pages, I happened to be writing an introduction for a visiting writer. I recognized in my draft a soft rebuttal to David’s post, but I decided it had to complete…
Facebook has become a social net-cessity, like the telephone, like politeness, like brushing the crumbs from your beard, but it has not yet become an invisible necessity. We’re conscious of it: we’re not sure whether we’re using it correctly, whether…
Every day I cross Ellis Avenue to avoid the construction zone of the University of Chicago’s emerging Mansueto Library, whose elliptical crystal dome caps four underground floors where 3.5 million books will be kept in compact storage.
When library…
