Good morning everyone...

In the news this morning is the announcement from the long-brewing decision by the Texas Board of Education to literally change the history books to include a conservative bent (or, as one person says, to provide "balance" because "academia is skewed too far to the left").

One man, a Mr. David Bradley, is quoted as saying, "I ( Read more... )

Ira Glass, ed.                                      The New Kings of Nonfiction

Terry Tempest Williams                 An Unspoken Hunger

Gabriel García Márquez                  Love In the Time of Cholera

David James Duncan                       The Brothers K*

Sarah Vowell                                      The Partly Cloudy Patriot*

Kurt ( Read more... )

Thanks to Flourish, here's a fantastic idea for how to spend Buy Nothing Day:

Go out and create art, a la Andy Goldsworthy! (More of his work here ... and here.)

It's so simple! I love it!

I don't know about all y'all, but when I opened my email this morning and saw the headline that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I literally yelped out loud and sloshed my tea all over myself. I know the peace prize has a controversial history, but still... this was a shock.

Now don't get me wrong -- I am a staunch supporter, even though like ( Read more... )

For those of you with a conservation bent (*ahem*, that should be everyone...), it's well worth checking out these photos of endangered and threatened species, compiled by Conservation International for the BBC. Yes, they're done in part for the scare factor of what we're killing off, but on the other hand -- they're gorgeous.

Take a look: A ( Read more... )

You've got to be kidding me. THIS is what Spokane is in the national news for:

Spokane Parks to detonate squirrels.

This headlined the Yahoo! news page today: Drought threatens 'Garden of Eden' marshes in Iraq

Is anyone else hearing the echoes of the Old Testament here? There are way too many stories of drought and desertification as punishment (or consequence) of human wrongdoing... have we learned anything in the last two thousand years?

I listened to Democracy Now! this morning for the first time in months - probably years, actually. The headline story, on Somali pirates, caught my attention; in it, Amy Goodman interviewed a Somali-Kenyan consultant/analyst who makes quite a lengthy argument that the pirates are really a community-mobilized coast guard, of sorts, who are acting in ( Read more... )

Ok, so it's nerdy as all getout, but I love the story that NPR ran yesterday on E.O. Wilson's research of the scent that ants emit when they die. Maybe it's because of my fifth-grade science experiment, which involved trapping ants from our backyard in quart jars and applying various powders from my chemistry set to see which would kill them, and ( Read more... )

AHA!

Classical quartet played inauguration to taped music.

I had wondered out loud how they managed to play in such cold weather (especially the clarinetist)... now we know!