In 1992, Hurricane Andrew battered South Florida, destroying 126,000 homes, wiping out 80 percent of the area’s farms and leaving 40 deaths in its wake. The damage totaled $26 billion, and as many as 11 insurance firms went bankrupt trying to cover hundreds of thousands of claims. Then-Gov. Jeb Bush said it was a wake-up call for the state, and its government, business and nonprofit leaders joined to create an expansive emergency planning and response program. By the time a series of heavy storms struck in 2004 and 2005, the state was better prepared. Strengthened building codes limited ... Read More
Policy-Heavy Play
March 4, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" became something of a cyberspace scandal in 2005, when gleeful gamers discovered its graphic sex scenes. But Ian Bogost found himself intrigued by the best-selling video game for another reason entirely. He was fascinated by one of the characters, a thug whose physical appearance was virtually unheard of in the gaming universe. This gangbanger had a gut. "Depending on what and how much he ate, he would get fatter," says the veteran video game designer, a faculty member of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "You could have him work out and get buff. That ... Read More
Rising Storm
March 4, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
There's a segment midway through Ivory Wars that epitomizes the best of the short documentaries produced by the New York-based production studio MediaStorm. In a series of close-up still photographs, we see rifle-toting soldiers and camera-toting National Geographic personnel affix a GPS-tracking "collar" to an elephant in Chad's Zakouma National Park, where, the previous year, poachers patrolling beyond the edge of the park had slaughtered at least 100 of the animals for their ivory. The elephant wearing the GPS device is dubbed Annie, and as soon as she is tagged, as one of the filmmakers ... Read More
Big Laugh at a Big Wheel
March 4, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
This Just In: Man on a Unicycle Earns Mockery, Derision From Passersby* Humor is just another form of testosterone-fueled aggression, according to Professor Sam Shuster, and he should know: He spent a year riding a unicycle through the streets of Newcastle upon Tyne in England. Surprised by the attention his hobby drew, Shuster decided to make an observational study. More than 90 percent of people responded physically to the unexpected sight of a unicycling professor, giving an exaggerated wave or stare, and almost half responded verbally — more men than women. Indeed, the differences ... Read More
Braking Up Is Easy to Do (In Traffic)
March 4, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
All traffic jams are annoying, but particularly frustrating are those that occur for no apparent reason — the ones that make you crawl along for miles, expecting to find a blocked lane. Instead, the traffic simply frees up, and you speed on your way, fuming about lost minutes and wondering what that was all about. Mathematicians at the University of Exeter have created a model that finally explains what is going on. They discovered that when a driver slows down suddenly — say, in response to a truck unexpectedly pulling into his or her lane — the driver of the car directly behind him ... Read More
Light Unto the Developing World
March 4, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Sheila Kennedy has never been comfortable deploying her talents for the well-to-do. While her architecture colleagues were busy designing LED-lined runways for fashion shows, she was wondering how that same technology could help nomads and indigent farmers. A quick, forceful speaker with an unabashedly idealistic streak, Kennedy, 48, led a group of designers and engineers to create a new lighting material, Portable Light, which she believes could help the world’s poor harvest their own light — light with an undeniable aesthetic quality. “It is — perhaps this is too subjective — kind ... Read More
Why Miller-McCune and Why Now?
March 4, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
I’m allergic to editor’s letters. You know, the columns at the fronts of magazines where editors explain, with disquieting cheer, just what a cracking good issue the staff has put out, once again. I particularly didn’t want to start the premiere issue of Miller-McCune with that sort of predictable blather. So I asked someone with a talent for intellectual surprise, longtime Atlantic correspondent James Fallows, to help out by interviewing me. I expected Fallows — an author of acclaimed books, an editor of significant magazines and a speechwriter for a president, among many ... Read More
Turning a New Leafy Green
March 4, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
The Symptoms: In August 2006, a rare and potent strain of Escherichia coli, O157:H7, began spreading across 26 states and into Canada, sickening more than 200 people during a six-week span. Many of the victims suffered debilitating kidney damage, and the bacterium claimed the lives of two elderly women and a child. Using a DNA-fingerprinting system, epidemiologists at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention matched bacteria in stool samples of hospitalized patients with pathogens in specific bags of "ready to eat" Dole spinach. The infected greens had been processed during a ... Read More
Clean the Tax Code
March 4, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
When hedge fund managers living in Greenwich, Conn., can pay a tax of only 15 percent on hundreds of millions of dollars of income — and even then, only when they deign to bring it into the United States from offshore accounts — something is wrong. But when Congress refuses to act to close that loophole, even after the press and the Congressional Budget Office have pointed out that closing it would offset the cost of eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax on the middle class, something is really wrong. Our tax system is broken and will remain so until we change the incentive systems ... Read More
The Shining City, Rebuilt
March 4, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
In the 1950s and '60s, Americans were experiencing a new kind of fear: Germany and Japan had been defeated, but they had been supplanted as enemies by an expansive Soviet Union (backed by the combined forces of several Eastern European allies), a newly installed communist dictatorship in China, and a militarily aggressive North Korea. Marxist ideology had gained a foothold in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Leftists argued that communism was the wave of the future, and conservatives feared they might be right; the Soviet Union, the most powerful of these new adversaries, had nuclear weapons. ... Read More
