The science-based community once was split between Democrats and Republicans — but not anymore.
Chris Mooney
Chris Mooney is a Prospect senior correspondent and, most recently, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatened Our Future (with Sheril Kirshenbaum).
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
A Dirty Business
Cynically using science to stall policy is the research equivalent of filing frivolous legal motions.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
A Really Long Heat Wave
Popular writers and scientists alike are trying to help readers understand climate change, but doing so requires new thinking about the scale of time.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
The Manufacture of Uncertainty
In his new book, Doubt is Their Product, David Michaels describes how the corporate practice of “manufacturing uncertainty” has taken over our regulatory system and undermined our health.
Posted inFeatures
This Will Mean the World to Us
Despite decades of delay, the next administration could still move us toward a solution before devastating climate change becomes irreversible.
Posted inSpecial Report
The Right Chemistry
When the 2005 Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced last October in Stockholm, the new laureates — Yves Chauvin of the Institute Français du Pétrole, Robert Grubbs of Caltech, and Richard Schrock of MIT — won recognition for creating “fantastic opportunities for producing new molecules.” They had explained and developed a reaction known as metathesis, […]
Posted inArticle
Survival Of The Flimsiest
There’s an anti-evolutionist brushfire sweeping the United States, and at its heart lies a paradox. These days, it seems, the less the creationists say about what they actually believe, the better they’re likely to fare. In an attempt to avoid triggering the First Amendment’s ban on commingling church and state, the more canny of today’s […]
Posted inArticle
Big Easy, Hard Truths
Recently my mother, a refugee from Hurricane Katrina now holed up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, pointed out something that had never occurred to me before: Despite having grown up in New Orleans, played football there, and gotten drunk for the first time there at a ridiculously young age, I had never had the quintessential experience […]
Posted inArticle
Thinking Big About Hurricanes
Editor’s note: This article was published on May 23, 2005, exactly 100 days before New Orleans’ levees were overpowered on Tuesday. Standing atop the levee that protects Metairie, Louisiana, a satellite of New Orleans, from Lake Pontchartrain to the north, everything seems normal at first. But scanning your eyes across the horizon — as I […]
Posted inArticle
Stop Him Before He Writes Again
Newspaper op-ed pages are supposed to be a forum for insightful commentary, diversity of opinion, and expert analyses of the issues of the day. Especially at major papers, they play an extremely powerful role in guiding and shaping the national discourse. All of this is as it should be. But unfortunately, precisely because op-ed slots […]