Category Archives: Uncategorized

When you have Jim Fallows explaining the art of software reviewing, you go with him.

If you have a college basketball game being played on an aircraft carrier, you go with it.

When you have a vintage gadget collection, you go with it. (h/t slashdot)

While I was editor of High Country News, my wife and I lived in the tiny (pop. 1,500) Colorado town of Paonia.

It’s a gorgeous place, on the West Slope of the Rockies about halfway between Aspen and Telluride. But it’s also a zillion miles from anything like a city, and there are very few jobs. Luckily, former HCN Publisher Ed Marston introduced my wife to the amazing Dr. Theo Colburn, a zoology professor emeritus who runs an amazing Paonia-based nonprofit called TEDX, or the Endocrine Disruption Exchange. Theo was kind enough to hire my wife. TEDX collects and disseminates research on chemicals that interfere with reproduction in some way, and it has just released a wonderful database of research into more than 1,300 of these compounds. If you’re interested in BPA and other chemicals that appear to have untoward effects on human development at very low doses, you’ll want to go here and download the spreadsheet.

Over at Grist, Lisa Hymas has written an informed and informative piece on Ron Paul vis a vis energy and the environment. It’s also admirably nonideological; Hymas simply notes the ways in which Paul’s quirky type of Libertarianism sometimes does and more often doesn’t match up with the concerns of the Environmental Movement writ large/general. Much of the piece is a roundup of what others have written but it’s a quality roundup, and includes a nice quote from a previous Grist interview of Paul:  “I don’t ride my bike because I think I’m destroying the environment by driving my car; I ride it because it’s a great way to be outdoors and enjoy the environment.”

This is a funny idea that is also brilliantly executed. And with a name like “OsamaInHell,” it’s sure to be a viral hit for many a moon. http://twitter.com/#!/OsamaInHell

There’s real competition in the race to be named academic abstract of the day. The titles of the two leading competitors alone should give you some idea of the difficulty in choosing between them:

1) “Social Category Salience Moderates the Effect of Diversity Faultlines on Information Elaboration”

2) “‘I don’t f***ing care!’ Marginalia and the (textual) negotiation of an academic identity by university students”

The prose within the abstracts is equally compelling. Parse the perfection of this sentence: “In line with our hypotheses, social category salience moderated the effect of faultline strength on elaboration.” Now, try to say it is not surpassed by this: “Drawing on discourse analytic concepts such as ‘footing’ and ‘stake’ this article seeks to understand what student marginalia can tell us about the ways in which the tension between ‘doing education’ and ‘doing being a student’ is managed and negotiated in sites other than the university tutorial.”

I’m at a loss to choose. Go here and here to read the full abstracts. And then come back and give me some help.

Amid the overwhelming crush of Osama-is-dead reportage and analysis, I’ve run into two posts that were truly helpful in creating as much clarity as possible in an inherently foggy situation. The first is ProPublica’s “Bin Laden Reading Guide,” an extraordinarily detailed and nuanced directory of the best of the bin Laden coverage so far. I am in awe of the two bloggers who put this clean, clear and useful package of links together. They must read the InterWebs in their sleep. Among the links they mention is “Notes on the Death of Osama bin Laden,” Steve Coll’s post for the New Yorker. The headline is typical New Yorker understatement; Coll has written a well-regarded book on the bin Laden family and many New Yorker posts and articles on intelligence and national security, especially regarding the Middle East. These “notes” are actually a distillation of what a highly intelligent and well-backgrounded journalist has learned over many years, as applied to the current situation regarding al Qaeda and Pakistan. If you had time to read nothing else and wanted a deeper understanding of the demise of bin Laden, this would be the piece to pick.