A Polar Bear on an ice flow in Manitoba, Canada where increasing temperatures have brought rapid environmental change (AFP File Photo) Elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, this phenomenon is commonly referred to as “spring.” Still, the EU is determined that the conversion of foodstuffs into environmentally friendly fuels isn’t a matter of great concern: The EU Commission on Monday rejected claims that producing biofuels is a “crime against humanity” that

With her seniors for two weeks. She was melting down last week about her schedule (her students can’t possibly do anything without her being there to support and witness them), and I said, hey, just think–in a week you’re going to be on the way to Hawaii for two whole weeks. In the back of my mind, of course, I was anticipating being able to hold my two weeks of

Invoking the ghost of Chico Esquela, TownHall’s Austin Hill spots some more elitism in the Democratic presidential hopefuls: The profile and name recognition that led both Obama and Clinton to lucrative publishing deals and enormous book sales have been brought about by the roles they occupy in our government. Arguably, their marketability at the bookstore has to some extent been subsidized by the federal government. Yet Clinton and Obama are first in line to

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I didn’t explain the “blog grammar” thing very well, but it goes beyond idiom, I think. That’s what I get for not using note cards. If you’ve ever read, say, Gravity’s Rainbow or Foucault’s Pendulum, you’ll note that the first fifty or so pages are incredibly slow going and, from a purely passive reading level, difficult to get through. The reason is, I think, that both Pynchon and Eco are

The NYT’s Frank Rich is so uniformly lame that I cannot recall ever having bothered to write about him.  But today’s dross on Barack Obama’s derision of small town America and lousy debate performance is too delusional to pass up: [V]iewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans,

Yesterday, I noted that the story behind Celeste Fremon’s piece in the Huffington Post — reporting Hillary Clinton’s derogatory comments about MoveOn and the “activist base” of the Democratic party — might be as interesting as the story itself: The sudden appearance of the Fremon piece makes me almost as curious about what goes on behind closed doors at the HuffPo and OffTheBus as what goes on at Democratic fundraisers.  OTB’s co-publisher, Jay Rosen,

With the Iraqi Army defeating Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra, the L.A. Times has moved on to tell its readers how terrible things might get in Najaf.  Buried in the middle of the piece, however, is a bit about the battle for Basra: This time, the grand ayatollahs have declined to aid the incendiary cleric. Three days into the Basra campaign, Grand Ayatollah Najafi issued a fatwa, or religious

I could have hoped that he’d been more cryptic about it, but McGehee’s got the dope, the lowdown, the 411: Jeff Goldstein, of Protein Wisdom blog, spoke at some kind of panel thingie about blogging today, and via a comment by Happyfeet there’s a link to some video of the panel thingie. One of the things Jeff talked about was commenters and the way he has attracted such an unusually