I know, I know, it’s a dog bites man story at this point, but today the New York Times came out with its weekly special section devoted to Science.  There was a story in there about some schoolchildren and a giant prehistoric frog, a review of some recent developments in Cretan archaelogy, a fascinating story […]

In a recent post I’ve written that American democracy is in more trouble than many of us think.  There are no magic solutions to these problems, but there are some things we can do that would reduce the stresses that our system is under during these extraordinary times.  So here it is: the Mead List […]

The New York Times turned down the Watergate story, giving the Washington Post ownership of the story of the decade.  Now the Washington Post is going for a repeat, scooping the somnolent Times on the Climategate story.  The Post story by Juliet Eilperin and David A. Farenholdt is no skeptic’s dream, but Post readers now […]

Almost 500 years ago, Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.  There’s no doubt that a lot of serious prayers were prayed and good sermons preached in the Castle Church where Luther posted his theses.  But over the years a lot of holy crap had collected […]

Antisemitism is never a great subject to discuss, but there are two good reasons for posting on it today.  One is that the entire internet has been aflame with the feud between Andrew Sullivan and his longtime mentor Leon Wieseltier, and the question of whether Sullivan is an antisemite has gotten half the country’s bloggers […]

The driving force in American politics today is a struggle to restructure and modernize some of our most basic institutions.  It’s only going to get more intense.Back before the global warming mess blew up, I wrote a post about the breakup of the ‘blue social model‘.  Not to regurgitate the whole post, but the mid-twentieth […]

There are two ways of looking at democracy: as a great shining ideal, or as a form of government that with all its many warts is the least bad kind that we know.Americans would like to think about it the first way; we get in trouble, however, if we forget that the second, more prosaic […]

Foreign Policy, another pillar of the American journalistic establishment (and another magazine that publishes my work when it can’t find anything better to print) has come out with a substantial piece on-line that places the blame for the meltdown of public confidence in climate science where it belongs: with bad procedures at the IPCC and […]

It had to happen and today the Associated Press has given the American public at large its first good look at a story that has been old news for weeks in countries where the media is more alert.  The story, by Seth Borenstein doesn’t cover all the angles, but it does a very good job […]

Recently I blogged that the only path forward for American (and indeed world) health care was to harness the power of computers, software and communication technology to create a system that delivered significantly better care at a significantly lower cost.This morning that system has come a little bit closer: Google has announced plans to build […]