  #13: The Frog Run by John Elder (2002)
My own experiences in Vermont constitute the worst times of my life, through no particular fault of the Green Mountain State. There, in a third-floor cinder block tenement in Montpelier, I spent most of my eighth-grade year living in fear of my mother’s drug-abusing boyfriend. A decade and a half later, I thought it ironic to find myself back there for a low-residency M.F.A. program, uncomfortable about facing the bad mojo from my past—little realizing that I was about to deal with more bad mojo there as my marriage began to unravel.
So my Vermont and John Elder’s Vermont strike me as two different places—different states of mind, at the very least. Full story »
Paul Isom is looking for a new job today. He was the student media director at East Carolina University. Why was he canned?
On Nov. 8, the [student] newspaper published a full-frontal photo of a streaker who ran onto the field during that weekend’s home football game. The decision prompted outcry from some readers and from university administrators who said it was “in very poor taste.”
If this photo was so controversial and in “very poor taste,” why did the university require two months to decide to give Isom four hours to clean out his office and get outta Dodge?
No doubt lawyers were consulted. After the photo was published, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs, Virginia Hardy, presaged what would come to pass:
We will be having conversations with those who were involved in this decision in an effort to make it a learning experience. The goal will be to further the students’ understanding that with the freedom of the press comes a certain level of responsibility about what is appropriate and effective in order to get their message across.
Learning experience my ass. The goal of the lesson being taught here is to warn student journalists and their advisers to not cross the university when it comes to maligning its image.
Full story »
[*B.S. means “Bad Science.” What did you think it meant?]
by Peter H. Gleick
Crossposted at Forbes and Huffington Post. To see S&R’s climate-related posts, click here
[Correction: Katharine Hayhoe was misidentified as a Republican in the original post at Forbes and HuffPo. This has been corrected below.]
The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011 – a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world. The scientific evidence for the accelerating human influence on climate further strengthened, as it has for decades now. Yet on the policy front, once again, national leaders did little to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe consequences of climate changes, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea-levels, loss of snowpack and glaciers, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and much more.
Why the failure to act? In part because climate change is a truly difficult challenge. But in part because of a concerted, well-funded, and aggressive anti-science campaign by climate change deniers and contrarians. Full story »
 #12: About This Life by Barry Lopez (1998)
The pieces collected in Barry Lopez’s About This Life profess to be “journeys on the threshold of memory.” They take the shape of essays, travel stories, and memoirs, although Lopez firmly plants them all in the first-person perspective. Most relate in some way to a specific place. At the heart of the book, though, his essay “The American Geographies” speaks most directly to the importance of landscape—and how people continue to misunderstand and even misrepresent what that really means.
“The real American landscape is a face of almost incomprehensible depth and complexity,” he says. Full story »
 The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is a joke. I think we all know this, but if you’re new to the issue a quick illustration should suffice: Madonna is in it. Rush, Kiss, Cheap Trick, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Deep Purple, Big Star, The Cure, Devo, Dire Straits, ELO, Hüsker Dü, INXS, Jethro Tull, Judas Priest, The Moody Blues, Motorhead, My Bloody Valentine, New Order, Peter Gabriel, The Replacements, Warren Zevon, XTC, Yes and Graham Parker aren’t. I could go on. And on. And on and on and on. But, in the interest of brevity, I won’t.
This is frustrating for a lot of people. Many of the artists would probably like to be acknowledged, and their fans no doubt take the slight personally. And the critics, gods, imagine trying to think about this if you’re a serious professional covering music. Full story »
 by Robert S. Becker
Stay ‘til the end – and a rich payoff of Carl Sagan’s gemlike insights. A little clean-up work first, to clear the palate.
I don’t regularly read Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer (CK, as in crank), often regret when I do, ending with gnashing teeth. From time to time, perplexity or hilarity moves me to the dark side, hunting out the loopy logic behind the latest fringe skullduggery. I used to read that wily conservative wordsmith, Peggy Noonan – a far better stylist – until I gagged at her unctuous Vatican sycophancy.
So, I brightened suspiciously at Krauthammer’s seemingly apolitical title, “Are we alone in the universe?” Full story »
Have you seen the vid on Youtube called “Iowa Nice”? If not, let’s start there.
The producer of the video, Scott Siepker, is an Iowa State University grad and host of Iowa Outdoors on Iowa Public Television. Full story »
 #11: Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams (1991)
“[W]ithout a mother,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in her book Refuge, “one no longer has the luxury of being a child.”
I am at my own mother’s, thinking about Williams’ words, thinking about Williams’ book. I was first introduced to Refuge last year during a Creative Nonfiction class I was taking, but I didn’t have the time then to read it. Months later, at the start of my “25 Books in 30 Days” challenge, it is one of the first books I turn to. I’ve not been able to write about it yet, though. I’ve had to wait until I’ve come here to my mother’s house in Ashtabula, Ohio, before I could fully process the nature of Williams’ loss.
Full story »
 With apologies to Pete Seger
Where have all the Tebows gone?
Zero passing
Where have all the Tebows gone?
Can’t pass at all
Where have all the Tebows gone?
Corners picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
I know, I know, this is mean-spirited. But I was pretty darn gracious when he was winning, and even posited that maybe he would be successful. Full story »
 #10: Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World by Linda Hogan (1995)
With the light patter of rain on the awning outside, I stole an afternoon nap on the living room couch. It was a quick one, fifteen minutes or so. When I woke, the rhythms outside had shifted. A gust of wind sang through the slits of the awning instead. I didn’t realize it yet, but it was the sound of winter finally coming.
I’m not as intuitively tuned into such sounds, such rhythms, as I’d like to be, but my subconscious seems to be working on that level today because Linda Hogan’s book Dwellings has challenged me to do so. There is, Hogan contends, a way of looking at the world that’s different than the way most of us are accustomed to. Since I’m exploring books that explore places, I thought it would be useful to have Hogan help me see place in a different way. Full story »
 Obama’s 2012 prospects: now for the bad news
John Cassidy, The New Yorker
December 30, 2011
“Consider yet another survey from Gallup, released on Thursday, which examined the ideological views of about a thousand people, who were roughly equally divided between Democrats, Republicans, and independents. (Actually, there were slightly more independents.) Despite this relatively even partisan split, forty-two per cent of the respondents described themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative.” Thirty-seven per cent described themselves as “moderate,” and just nineteen per cent described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
If you think this sounds promising for the Republicans, I would agree with you, especially since fifty-seven per cent of the respondents described President Obama as “liberal” or “very liberal” and only twenty-three per cent described him as “moderate.” Full story »
Scholars & Rogues wants to thank our music-loving readership for making this the most successful Tournament of Rock yet, and we’d especially like to say a huge thanks to all the bands who participated. ToR3 featured a number of surprises and upsets, but in the end we hope that everybody found a new band to love.
So, the Finals represented our biggest turnout ever and the margin was incredibly close. The Blueflowers and The Lost Patrol asked their fans to vote and they did. When the last chad was unhung, the winner by a 52-48% margin was… Full story »
 #8: The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1953)
#9: The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (1961)
The thermometer says it’s 23 degrees, but the wind blowing east off the Gulf of Maine says differently. I can hardly feel my fingers though my deerskin mittens have been off for less than half a minute. I wanted to grab a couple snapshots with my Blackberry of the waves as they roll in and hit the granite shoreline that the receding tide has been slowly revealing. As the waves hit, the same wind that’s numbing my fingers is sheering off the tops of the whitecaps before they hardly have time to spray. There’s a booming flash of white—and then the wind erases it.
I’m standing at the southern tip of Mt. Desert Island, near the western end of the natural seawall. I’ve come here, to the edge of the sea, to spend some time with Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea. Full story »
The Tech Curmudgeon looked up the word “technology” in his dead tree American Heritage Dictionary, and just in case he was dating himself, he looked up the word in an online dictionary too. Both dictionaries generally agree with each other that the word “technology” means the application of science or knowledge to achieve a practical objective. That’s a pretty broad definition that takes in anything from stereo systems to car engines to air- and spacecraft to oil extraction equipment. So the Tech Curmudgeon wants to know when was it that “technology” came to mean just personal gadgets, social media, and smartphone apps? Full story »
 by Robert Becker
Is “Higgs boson” a creative particle or energy field? Can we thus infer an “anti-God particle,” as anti-matter opposes matter, or dark energy battles gravity?
Any covenant with Godhead, in my book, comes down to Creation. Genesis, the source of time, space, and being; in short, existence. Especially our piddling existence. Without creation as we know it, we’d be deficient in mass, not even rocks; or with multiverse speculations, we could also be someone else, who knows where, gabbing with utter aliens. Because we esteem existence (over all the sorry alternatives), let us greet the New Year by honoring the force that could well have made something real out of, well, something not. The “God Particle.” Hallelujah!
If this particle is a particle. Full story »
 #7: Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey (1968)
Once more, I feel late to the party. I had no idea who Edward Abbey was, yet nearly every nonfiction writer I’ve read so far has referenced him. The only one who hasn’t was Thoreau, and that’s because Abbey hadn’t been born yet—and wouldn’t be for another sixty years after Thoreau’s death.
Abbey and Thoreau still share a connection, though: Novelist Larry McMurtry has apparently referred to Abbey as “the Thoreau of the American West.” Even the dead guy has a link to Abbey. Damn.
I stumbled on Abbey completely by accident. A blurb on his book Desert Solitaire described it as “an account of Abbey’s seasons as a ranger at Arches National Park.” Having just spent this past summer as a National Park ranger, and contemplating a similar writing project, I thought Abbey might be of use.
Boy, was he. Full story »
Atmospheric CO 2 concentration data from ice core (blue, 1750-1975)
and direct atmospheric measurements (red, 1960-2010) vs. “compounding
interest” model described in post (purple). Click for a larger version. In many ways, climate science is difficult. There’s a reason that the best climate models require some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world in order to run. But the most important concepts are easily understood by a non-expert with either a little mathematical skill or the ability to use some simple online tools. This is the inaugural post of a new series that seeks to illustrate how anyone and everyone can understand the most important concepts underlying climate science and the reality that is human-caused climate disruption.
Are people adding a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere? It’s such an easy question to ask, but the answer depends on what you mean by “a lot.” And it depends on what you’re referring to. Full story »
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