Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Osborn points to the thousands of wooden casks of aging Tabasco mash Photo: Michael Isaac Stein Row after row of blackened wood barrels are piled 30 feet high in a dim warehouse on Avery Island in southern Louisiana. Harold “Took” Osborn leads me through the endless stacks, in a setting reminiscent of the final scene…
In December, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet met with a group of Times employees to answer questions about his much-questioned opinion section. At the time, A.G. Sulzberger, now publisher of the Times, was conducting a tour of the newsroom he was about to inherit, meeting with employees from different corners of the newspaper. The Q&A session…
Image: Maxpixel I was hoping to start 2018 off with a positive blog, like some of my colleagues, but then I glanced at my feeds and saw ‘chocolate extinction’ all over them. Apparently, news broke over the new year that chocolate was going to go extinct in mere decades, as climate change threatens the survival…
Photo: AP The White House’s effort to head every science-adjacent agency with science skeptics continued apace today, when the Senate held a confirmation hearing for Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Trump’s pick to lead NASA. You’ll be shocked to learn that his views on climate change do not exactly comport with the overwhelming scientific consensus on the…
Illustration by Sean McCabe Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wants you to know that he was responsible for persuading President Trump to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. Pruitt has never said that explicitly, of course – he understands that if he wants to keep his job, he needs…
As an Arctic researcher, I’m used to gaps in data. Just over 1% of US Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. In truth, some of the maps we use today haven’t been updated since the second world war. Navigating uncharted waters can prove difficult, but it comes with the territory of working in…
Dr. William Happer, a retired Princeton physicist and trusted Breitbart expert, met with then president-elect Donald Trump in early January, reportedly to discuss the role of science advisor; he told The Guardian last month that if offered the post he would accept it. On inauguration day, in a colorful demonstration of his personal brand of…
Eery year, during the run-up to Halloween, when Jim DeMint goes to Hell’s mega-mall and sits on Satan’s lap, he has a list of things he wants for the holiday. The parents of the assembled demons and imps behind him in line often get frustrated because the list is so long. On Thursday, the Trump…
Smoke billows from stacks as a Chinese woman wears as mask while walking in a neighborhood next to a coal-fired power plant in Shanxi, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) With little warning or explanation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently canceled a major climate change conference that had been scheduled for next month in…
Trump is in power, and one of his first acts has been to gag government agencies. After the National Park Service bruised his ego by retweeting a New York Times tweet showing Trump’s inauguration numbers to be lower than President Obama’s 2009 crowd, they were ordered to stop all tweets, including scheduled ones. He then…