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Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said the phrase in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” It, in this case, was obscenity, and Stewart was making a point about the trickiness of properly defining the term. How do you have an argument about pornography if you can’t quite say what it is? For [...]
Temperatures in New York City today, where I live, breaching 90 F and feeling more like 100. And New York is not alone—this map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that nearly every corner of the country is suffering from unusual heat: Pretty disgusting. And the bad news is that should climate models [...]
Though he’s the single person most associated with climate change, over the last couple of years Al Gore had kept a somewhat lower public profile on the issue. It’s not that the former Vice President disappeared entirely—he continued advocacy work through his Alliance for Climate Protection, testified on climate science at Congress and came out [...]
With all the climate conversation currently littering the Internet, and the myriad ways that extreme weather is linked to global warming, it’s hard not to get confused about climate change sometimes – and given the sheer volume of muddled information out there, you might even be forgiven for being unconvinced by the arguments thus far. [...]
Nobody likes a 40-year heat wave, but a 40-year heat wave in the midst of national drive to conserve energy seems particularly cruel. Last month, residents of Tokyo and other parts of Japan, where electricity is in short supply after March 11, endured highs of 95 degrees — and pangs of guilt when they reached [...]
Even if you aren’t near the Yellowstone River oil spill right now, the scene is disturbingly familiar. It looks so much like its 2010 cousin in the Gulf of Mexico that it’s almost spooky – the gross underestimation of how much oil is out there, vague reassurances to residents about their health and property safety, [...]
As I write in the cover story of TIME this week, we’re in the middle of a seafood transition. Once nearly all of our fish were caught wild—indeed, as Paul Greenberg has written, fish are the last wild food in a world where nearly everything else we eat comes from a farmer’s labor. But that’s [...]
The corporate food system in America has come under intense pressure in recent years over its environmental and humanitarian standards—most recently when a pork producer in Iowa was filmed by undercover allegedly abusing its animals, as my colleague Alexandra Silver wrote about recently. Usually industrial producers and green groups are at each others’ throats, fighting [...]
I have the cover story this week on the state of global seafood, examining the rapid growth in aquaculture—and looking at the challenges facing the fish farming industry as it begins to provide an ever larger proportion of our seafood. It’s a massive subject, as you can imagine, and I wasn’t able to go into [...]
