* "The 7 psychological reasons that are stopping us from acting on climate change."
* "10 appalling findings in the Senate's torture report"
* "Project Goliath: Inside Hollywood's secret war against Google"

"The way Sarah Koenig tells it, Serial is a story about our system of justice working pretty much as it should, and failing miserably at providing anything that looks like justice. I think in the last episode, she's going to point out that Adnan Syed was convicted in a few hours - beyond a reasonable doubt - for the murder of Hae-Min Lee. I think ( Read more... )

"Among other appalling details, the report states that at least seven of the tortured detainees provided no intelligence at all. Many of those tortured unsurprisingly provided faulty intelligence, and none provided any intelligence that could not have been obtained through other methods. It prevented no terrorist attacks, and didn't contribute to ( Read more... )

"This fundamental bias marks the central thread that runs through the coverage of everything from Bill Cosby to Ferguson to the US drone strike program. Stripping away each of those storylines’ unique details reveals the same flawed core: a media that grants the benefit of the doubt to the establishment and that saves its cynicism for the voiceless ( Read more... )

"The Dark Power of Fraternities": the hold that fraternities hold over colleges, the history of how they got it, and the crimes that are being covered up.

"I've just spent nearly a week back home in exurban Atlanta, and I regret to report that the events in and in reaction to Ferguson have brought back (at least in some of the older white folks I talked with) nasty and openly racist attitudes I haven't heard expressed in so unguarded a manner since the 1970s. The polling we've all seen about ( Read more... )

"After six months of declining oil prices, we suddenly got plunging oil prices. Why? Not so much because of the shale oil revolution in the US. For all the attention it gets, fracking has increased global oil production by only a few percent and would normally have only a moderate effect on prices. Unfortunately, these aren't normal times: in ( Read more... )

"The goal of criminal law is to be fair - to treat similarly situated people similarly - as well as to reach just results. McCulloch gave Wilson's case special treatment. He turned it over to the grand jury, a rarity itself, and then used the investigation as a document dump, an approach that is virtually without precedent in the law of Missouri or ( Read more... )

"These big-picture reforms are fundamentally political solutions that will require long-term effort, coalition politics that spans race, ethnicity and political affiliation - a challenge, but also a necessity. As police and prosecutors assume more and more power in the United States - regulating immigration (formerly a matter of administrative law) ( Read more... )

Zen Pencils takes on "Ozymandis."