A mile off Florida's Big Pine Key and 30 feet under water, sunlight streams down onto lumps of brain coral. Scarlet grouper, white hogfish and electric-blue angelfish dart about. It seems the kind of underwater scene that made the Keys a diver's paradise, unless you know the current reality, which Ken Nedimyer does. Hovering over the bottom in scuba gear, Nedimyer buries his hand in sand and exhumes what look like small white bones but are actually dead pieces of once-ubiquitous staghorn coral. Then he makes a sweeping motion with his arm, the pantomimed message clear: There used to be a lot ... Read More
Making International News
May 19, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
In July 2004, Cristi Hegranes found herself in a small village in Nepal, near the border with Tibet, as civil war enveloped the region. In the brutal, decade-long struggle between Maoist rebels and the government forces they wanted to topple, nearly 13,000 people were killed, with hundreds of thousands displaced. In the midst of an eight-month reporting stint to finish her joint master's thesis in journalism and political science, Hegranes was freelancing for international news organizations, producing stories on human-rights abuses, gender issues and the cultural impacts of the war. Most ... Read More
Political Report Card
May 19, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
Our country's founders had a particularly keen sense of education's importance. I'm not imagining thoughts to put into the founders' heads; I'm recalling Thomas Jefferson's actual words: "Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are the only safe depositories ... to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. An amendment to our Constitution must here come in aid of public education." This, from an avid proponent of states' rights and the founder of the oldest political party in America. His counterpart, ... Read More
Bioterror in Context
May 19, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
William R. Clark, professor and chair emeritus of immunology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been a research scientist for 30 years and has written a string of books for the general public. His latest, Bracing for Armageddon?, published by Oxford University Press in May, examines the science and politics of bioterrorism in the United States. His conclusion: We shouldn't be so worried. Although the United States will have spent $50 billion on defense against a bioterrorism attack by the end of 2008, Clark argues that we have much more to fear from natural pandemic ... Read More
Sustainable Acclaim
May 19, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
From food shortages in developing countries to melting glaciers in the arctic to soaring fuel prices everywhere, the American public has been confronted with an array of global sustainability and security problems. The onset of this barrage may seem sudden, but economist Jeffrey Sachs has been dealing with sustainability problems for decades as an academic and an economic adviser to countries around the world. He's now director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, a multidisciplinary research center created to tackle the complex issues of sustainable development, and a special ... Read More
Over the Horizon
May 19, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Why has the U.S. political press found a possibly imprecise use of the word "bitter" fascinating for weeks on end? Why does a search of significant English-language news sources turn up 985 articles in the last year that include the words "Britney" and "underwear"? And why, oh why, do news organizations all follow the same stories almost all the time, moving in such complete lockstep that they might as well be Groucho Marx in the Duck Soup mirror scene? Because I've been a journalist for decades, I've been asked why the news media seem so repetitive and, yes, dumb at least several hundred ... Read More
Help, the Conservatives Are Attacking My Brain
May 19, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Shortly after Michael Moore released his anti-George W. Bush opinion documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 in the summer of 2004, the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a poll. Of 5,000 adults who responded, 8 percent had seen the film. Another 8 percent told pollsters they had listened to right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Only 12 people — less than one-quarter of 1 percent — said they'd done both. A political scientist might have viewed this as evidence of the red state/blue state divide. A media analyst might chalk it up to the rise of specialized, ... Read More
Should the Government Make Us Happy?
May 19, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Tim Kasser wants to be happy. If you live in America, odds are, so do you. There's a crucial difference between you and Kasser, though. After two decades of poring over and contributing to academic research on what makes people happy or unhappy, anxious or depressed, Kasser can predict what's likely to keep him content and what isn't. He makes life choices based on those studies; he thinks if you did the same, you might end up happier. And he thinks it's time the government helps you get happy. The research tells Kasser that Americans are cash-wealthy, time-poor and not as happy as they ... Read More
Righting Wrongs by Writing Writs
May 19, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
During the 11 years it took to make Writ Writer, a concise and compelling documentary premiering June 3 on the PBS series Independent Lens, some issue addressed in the film — prison overcrowding, say, or allegations of abuse by guards — would appear in the headlines. "This should be coming out right now," producer/director Susanne Mason would think. But she never expected the film's central issue — habeas corpus, or the right of a prisoner to petition a court for release — to be reopened for debate. A series of court decisions over many decades had firmly established the tenet, with ... Read More
The Doubt Makers
May 19, 2008 • By • 2 Comments
In 1998, when an epidemiologist named David Michaels became assistant secretary of energy for environment, safety and health, the novice bureaucrat supported a proposal to strengthen the beryllium exposure limit for atomic-industry workers. He learned that the existing standard had been set, almost 50 years earlier, by two scientists on their way to a meeting at an Atomic Energy Commission facility. Despite substantial evidence that much lower exposures were causing debilitating lung disease, what Michaels calls the "taxicab standard" had not changed since 1949. "When I looked at the ... Read More
