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Steve Coll’s Choppy Portrait of ExxonMobil

May 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Private Empire

Private Empire is an important contribution to the ongoing debate about our energy future. For his new book being released this week, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll culled data from more than 400 interviews, numerous court cases, and government records to construct a series of engaging and informative snapshots of ExxonMobil, the largest and most profitable private oil company in the world. Coll begins with the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and takes readers all the way up to the company’s announcement of record profits in 2011. He focuses on ExxonMobil’s efforts to ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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Profile: Reddy Stayed Steady During Gulf Oil Spill

August 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Last November, a half year after the BP oil spill, as Christopher Reddy sat in a Mobile, Ala., restaurant, he overheard a customer at a nearby table ask a friend if he would order fish. "The other customer said, 'No, thanks, I don't like my fish with a side order of cancer.'" Reddy, a marine chemist, pondered telling them that scientific data from the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies indicate that eating fish from the Gulf of Mexico after the April 20, 2010, spill wasn't dangerous. "But I had a failure of nerve. I wish I had spoken to them." He increasingly ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Profile, September-October 2011
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Year After BP Oil Spill: Where Are We?

May 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and blowing out an oil well a mile below the ocean's surface. In the four frantic months it took to seal off the well, almost five million barrels of crude oil spewed into the Gulf, causing untold economic and environmental havoc. A year after the spill, Dr. Molly Redmond talks about the impact of the spill on the gulf.  Redmond, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was on the scene in the gulf within a few weeks of the beginning of the spill and she is among ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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Time for Robin Hood to Make a Comeback

March 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

What do you think of when you think of Nottingham? We know, we know — the shopping, the nightlife district, the ... um ... er ... oh, who are we kidding? We all think of Robin Hood, of course. But try telling that to the city leaders. Researchers from Nottingham University Business School surveyed nearly 400 visitors and locals on the question, "If I say 'Nottingham' to you, what immediately comes to mind?" Nearly one-third of respondents named the legendary archer and bandit; shopping came in second, followed by crime. (Apparently "stealing from the rich" really caught on in Nottingham, ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, March-April 2011, The Cocktail Napkin
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The Human Causes of Unnatural Disaster

February 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Blowout in the Gulf, a new book on Deepwater Horizon, opens with the observation that the ruined oil platform was dubbed Macondo, after the setting for the novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Written by the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, the novel is an apocryphal tale of a prosperous town cut off from civilization, too self-involved to notice the signs of its own corruption. Ultimately, it is wiped off the face of the Earth in a deluge. The parallels were too thematically powerful for the authors of Blowout to ignore in their account of the BP Gulf oil ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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10 Memorable Threads from 2010

December 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The short days in the Northern Hemisphere produce a peculiar journalistic crop, the Top 10 list. At Miller-McCune.com, we’re not immune to the pull of that chestnut, but the wonk rays so prevalent here force a mutation. Instead of a Top 10 list, here’s 10 for 2010, stories that are popular and memorable but without the baggage of perfection as determined in a year-end frenzy of instantaneous deliberation. Of course, some of the best movies never get nominated for Oscars, and so it is here. We’ll make apologies to stalwarts like Jai Ranganathan (of Curiouser & Curiouser fame) or ... Read More

More like this: Media
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No Port After the Storm

August 31, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Madeline Luster's family has lived in the 7th Ward of New Orleans for generations. Her home is a five-minute walk from Tremé, the neighborhood featured on HBO's program of the same name. Having turned 90 in July, Luster still lives in the home she inherited from her mother, but faces bulging, waterlogged cracks in the walls and ceiling created by Hurricane Katrina. "I need new gutter cans," she said; her precarious gutters haven't been fixed since the storm. Luster’s shotgun-style house has an empty lot next to it, and a tree that fell across her back door was all that prevented looters ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, Politics
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