Bill McKibben
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Hard right
In their book, Off Center, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson use statistics to prove that the Republicans have defied political gravity. Instead of trimming their sails to the moderate breezes of the American middle, the Republicans have lurched far to the right. “According to the conventional wisdom about American politics, this shouldn’t be possible,” write Hacker and Pierson.
Poor no more
In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey D. Sachs convincingly depicts world poverty as a manageable problem and presents a plausible and nearly painless plan for dealing with it. His optimism may be somewhat misplaced, but his hopeful, simple prescription is powerful.
High fidelity: Dogged devotion
I live in the north country mountains, where winter begins in late October and gives up, some years, in early May....
Food fight
The Farmer’s Diner in Barre, Vermont, serves the foods you would expect at a diner—ham and eggs, home fries, hamburgers, milkshakes....
Design-a-kid: Does humanity need an upgrade?
"People will be inclined to give their children those skills and traits that align with their own temperaments and lifestyles,” writes Gregory Stock, an apostle of human genetic engineering w...
Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry
The main story in a recent issue of the newspaper that serves my small town was "Nevins Retires After Decades of Parts Service." Nevins sold auto parts for 40 years....
Driving global warming: The machines for burning gasoline
Up until some point in the 1960s, people of a certain class routinely belonged to segregated country clubs without giving it much thought—it was “normal.” And then, in the space o...
Climate change and the unraveling of creation: Taking a global inventory
Ten years ago I wrote a book called The End of Nature, which was the first book for a general audience about the question of global warming. At the time, climate change was a hypothesis....