David Roberts reviews recent books on the environment, including one by Thomas Friedman, and concludes that they reflect an evolution of the debate on global warming:
It soon became clear that the next debate, about what and how much to do about the problem, would be every bit as contentious. Conservatives shifted seamlessly from climatic Pollyannas to economic Chicken Littles, insisting that strong steps to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions would destroy prosperity.
Cute pictures of endangered polar bears have done little to counter that argument, but a more effective response is now taking shape. Rather than focusing narrowly on the ecological, it takes a more expansive view, casting "green" as savvy economics and tough-minded national-security strategy. Curiously, this approach finds its most powerful expression in the writing not of longtime environmentalists but of green's recent converts. Enter New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman.
And Adam Serwer talks to Myrna Perez of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU about efforts to prevent voter disenfranchisement:
Adam Serwer: How does the voter purge process work?
Myrna Perez: It differs from state to state, and it depends what kind of purge we're talking about. People can be purged for a number of reasons; they can be purged because someone believes they have died, or they have moved, or they have a criminal conviction, or they have a duplicate registration, or they've been adjudicated incapacitated for the purposes of voting. The process for each is different, but generally what happens is officials look at a list of people who are ineligible for one of those reasons and compare the list of persons who are ineligible to people who are currently registered. When they identify a person that has matched, they take whatever next steps are appropriate, and there are legally required steps depending upon what grounds of purge they are being investigated for, and then they remove them.
Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they’re published.
—The Editors
