Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
When Jill Stein ran as the Green Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, media attention to her candidacy was rare. Now, with two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in history, she has received widespread attention. There seems to be record interest in third party campaigns, including Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. The Nation published a debate between Socialist Seattle City …
Carbon dioxide doesn’t kill climates; people do. And the world would be better off with fewer of them. That’s a glib summary of a serious and seriously provocative book by Travis Rieder, a moral philosophy professor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University. When economists write about climate change, they’ll often bring up something called the Kaya identity—basically a multiplication problem (not an espionage novel) that helps …
QUEENS, N.Y. — Wendy Thompson always knew she wanted her son to go to college, but she didn’t realize so many people would disagree. Her son was born with cerebral palsy, a disease that has him using a wheelchair, but has little impact on his academic abilities. He graduated from high school with a Regents diploma in 2013 — a …
Does the failure of the U.S.-backed, major insurgent August “push” on Aleppo – and the terms of the consequent ceasefire, to which some in the U.S. only irascibly agreed – constitute a political defeat for the U.S. and a “win” for Russia? Yes, in one way: Moscow may, (just may) have cornered America into joint military air attacks on Al Qaeda in Syria, …
Recently, sorting through a pile of old children’s books, I came across a volume, That Makes Me Mad!, which brought back memories. Written by Steve Kroll, a long-dead friend, it focused on the eternally frustrating everyday adventures of Nina, a little girl whose life regularly meets commonplace roadblocks, at which point she always says… well, you can guess from the title! Vivid …
Using a simple membrane extract from spinach leaves, researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a bio-photo-electro-chemical (BPEC) cell that produces electricity and hydrogen from water using sunlight. The raw material of the device is water, and its products are electric current, hydrogen and oxygen. The findings were published in the August 23 online issue of Nature Communications. The …
A study on human behavior has revealed that 90% of the population can be classified into four basic personality types: Optimistic, Pessimistic, Trusting and Envious. However, the latter of the four types, Envious, is the most common, with 30% compared to 20% for each of the other groups. This is one of the main conclusions of a study recently published …
As global warming has surged this year, so too has America’s ambition for heroic climate action. Politicians, economists, and activists have been looking to America’s astonishing mobilization for World War II as a model for victory in the twenty-first century’s great climate emergency. This spring, Senator Bernie Sanders called for a World War II-scale climate mobilization at the CNN presidential …
Agrochemical giants Syngenta and Bayer discovered in their own tests that their pesticides caused severe harm to bees, according to unpublished documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the environmental group Greenpeace. The companies conducted the trials on products that used the controversial pesticides known as neonicotinoids, or neonics, which have long been linked to rapid bee decline. Neonics are …
President Obama’s final speech to the UN goes beyond any-thing anyone has ever heard in terms of hypocrisy: it’s too bad his Nobel can’t be parlayed into a prize for phoniness. It was a beautifully crafted speech — I’m sure he and Michelle burned the midnight oil to produce it — but I don’t think many leaders appreciated it. This …
