On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency created a Superfund site just four blocks from my apartment.
The Gowanus Canal is a two-mile waterway running through South Brooklyn into Gowanus Bay near Red Hook (where the new Ikea is). Henry Hudson and Giovanni di Verrazano both navigated the Gowanus Inlet, which led to salt marshes and navigable [...]
Author Archive
Cleanup on the Gowanus Canal
Boredom?
I was thinking this week about boredom, first in a religious context. When I was a kid, church was pretty boring — although, as “good kid,” I was kept in line by a combination of my hypertrophied superego and an intense interest in doodling.
As an adolescent, I started to really take an interest in [...]
Annals of extrajudicial killing
Obama administration claims the right to assassinate American citizens. Why bother with law enforcement and courts when you can just order a hit?
How not to walk out of your Oscar party in disgust
This was going to be a comment to Parrish’s post, but it got too long. And I should know better than to challenge Parrish’s views on filmic issues, since not only does she live much closer than I do to the heart of the country’s movie industry, she apparently even has screeners in her house. [...]
The ionosphere comes to the rescue
The Earth is constantly bombarded by solar radiation. When some wavelengths of this radiation encounter the thinnest, outermost reaches of the atmosphere, they knock electrons off of otherwise perfectly fine atoms, creating charged particles (ions). Because the atmosphere is so thin, the ions are fairly widely distributed and hang around for a while as charged [...]
Something I did not know about Haiti
Leave it to Pat Robertson to turn tragedy into an occasion for total weirdness. Seriously, watch the clip. (Via Yglesias, who offers an explanation.) (Also, you guys have heard about this thing where you text “HAITI” to 90999 and $10 goes to the Red Cross, to be charged to your next phone bill, right?)
Haunty
TMK sent this spooky link; I thought it went well with this one — a strong dose of failed techno-utopia.
Dave’s Top 20/Bottom 10/Questionable 5 for 2009
So back in college, I worked for an off-campus student paper that some of you are familiar with. One of our longstanding features was a Top 20/Bottom 10, a concise and witty summing-up of the past week’s news. One of my favorite things about the feature was that the format made you focus on good [...]
Although it was nice to take a moment to remember Spongmonkeys
This graphic of Internet memes has a lot of obvious choices and a lot of stuff I didn’t know — and some obvious omissions. What about that kid who sold a million pixels for $1 a piece?
An exercise
My internet’s down, so this is short, an exercise for the reader.
On Wednesday, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling (and let’s just pause a moment to savor the delightful Britishness of “Exchequer,” “Alistair,” and “Darling”), announced that a special tax of 50% would be levied on bonuses of more than £25,000 paid to [...]
