“We’re slightly off course. But we wanted to let the trainee run the boat,” jokes Chellie Pingree over the din of an outboard motor. It’s a chilly, starlit September night off the coast of Rockland, Maine, and Pingree — a onetime farmer, divorced mother of three, former owner of a wool-knitting business and progressive Democratic […]
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 inFeatures
Sins of Petition:
In late January, The New York Times ran an influential story with the headline “Some for Abortion Rights Lean Right in Cloning Fight.” Certain members of the “political left,” Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg revealed, had united with religious conservatives to support a ban on not only human reproductive cloning — that is, on cloning […]
Posted inFeatures
The Future Is Later
In his recent book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, Francis Fukuyama writes, “Cloning is the opening wedge for a series of new technologies that will ultimately lead to designer babies…If we get used to cloning in the near term, it will be much harder to oppose germ-line engineering for enhancement purposes in […]
Posted inArticle
Attack of the Clones meets the Lord of the Luddites.
In his recent American Prospect Online article, “Attack of the Metaphors,” Matthew Nisbet lucidly explains why even though it shouldn’t, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones will inevitably come to shape this nation’s ongoing political debate about cloning. George Lucas’s take on this technology, Nisbet argues, resonates with themes from Brave New World, […]
Posted inArticle
Idea Log:
It always happens around this time of year, when early May thunderstorms ring in the so-called National Day of Prayer. Numerous falsehoods, and even more numerous half-truths, start getting aired concerning the role of religion — the implication is almost always Christianity — in the founding of the United States. One example, revealed by the […]
Posted inArticle
Why everyone has a right to criticize the Catholic Church.
Idea Log tends to enjoy Peter Beinart’s columns in The New Republic, but his latest item on the Catholic Church scandal is rather puzzling. On the magazine’s Web site the piece is framed as an article on “What not to say about the pedophilia scandal.” But a far more accurate title would have been, “Don’t […]
Posted inArticle
Editor’s Desk:
Dear readers, As I’m sure you’ve noticed, since the beginning of April The American Prospect Online has been running a new daily feature called “Tapped.” Compiled by staff, this is a link-intensive collection of musings, ramblings, opinions, and other assorted posting on the news and policy developments of the day — from political gossip about […]
Posted inArticle
Rush don’t know Dittoheads.
On a recent show, Rush Limbaugh once again swatted at The American Prospect. As he put it on his Web site, TAP had succumbed to something he termed “The Raspberry Effect” (links added): For those of you who don’t recall, the great columnist for the Washington Post, William Raspberry, wrote a 1993 column extremely critical […]
Posted inArticle
Idea Log:
It seems that Bill McKibben, the leading enviro author of The End of Nature, might have had Idea Log at least partly in mind when he wrote his latest New York Times op-ed “Unlikely Allies Against Cloning.” Defending what he calls a “broad coalition of environmentalists, feminists and other progressives” who have joined religious conservatives […]
Posted inArticle
Editor’s Desk:
Dear Readers, I just couldn’t keep this one from you. As any liberal publication might, The American Prospect has had its bumpy times with the right’s radio megastar Rush Limbaugh. In case you don’t recall, Limbaugh got his dander up last summer when I implicated him in a campaign to demonize Tom Daschle. There are […]
