We think that diamonds are very important, gold is very important, all these minerals are very important," says Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate who helped women in her country plant more than 40 million trees. "We call them precious minerals. ... But that part of these minerals that is on top, like it is the skin of the Earth, that is the most precious of the commons." Resplendent in a yellow dress and head wrap, Maathai is the moral center of DIRT! The Movie, a kaleidoscopic celebration of the saviors of the soil, from the plains of Africa to the sidewalks of The Bronx. ... Read More
The Mind of a Terrorist
February 24, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Can reading William James help us defeat terrorism? University of Maryland social psychologist Arie Kruglanski is convinced of it. He opened a recently published paper on the motivation of suicide bombers with a quote from the Victorian-era psychologist and philosopher: Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism ... no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Ninety-nine years after those ... Read More
I See a Quake in Your Future. Sometime.
February 16, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Science is messy. For every step forward on the road to truth, there are two steps in some other direction. And the way toward earthquake prediction, the Holy Grail of seismology, is littered with the dashed hopes of those who have failed. "Even well-trained scientists, even brilliant scientists, can fool themselves in their quest to prove something they believe or want to be true," says Susan Hough in her engaging new book, Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction. "... It is a hard thing for any scientist to do, to admit they have been on a path that ... Read More
Autumn of the Republic?
December 24, 2009 • By • 9 Comments
Did America slip into a semiliterate, polarized, pre-fascist state over the past decade or so, allowing greedy oligarchs and corporate elites to run the government? Two books I recently read offer reasonably persuasive evidence and arguments that the country did, and a third suggests that dictatorial mindsets could besiege Americans, with an assist from the Internet, if they don't come to their more deliberative senses. Each of the books offers an informed diagnosis of the dangers that widespread ignorance and ideological polarization pose for American democracy, though none offers a ... Read More
Looking Back in Anger
November 3, 2009 • By • 4 Comments
On the first page of the preface to his book, Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, Seth Kalichman describes his initial encounter with an academic colleague who had written a Web-published screed against the "AIDS myth." "I mean I was really angry," he writes, with a sense of frustrated dismay that permeates the book. The dismay is understandable; Denying AIDS is not merely a history of the movement skeptical to widely accepted mainstream science about the disease, but also a detailed account of the author's personal journey, via lecture halls and message ... Read More