Between the payback presidential visits, the signs, and the advertising campaigns, one quickly gets the message that it takes more than a little hurricane to get New Jersey down. And on the first weekend of June, the casual over-flyer could have certainly almost missed the few remaining stick piles, bisected...

Market bubbles come and go, but they all have things in common: a few people get rich, a lot of people get taken, and a mess is left for the taxpayers to clean up. To understand the hydro-fracking bubble, there are some things one must know: each well only produces...

It's often been observed that one must leave the country of birth to see it more clearly, a truism that applies to politics, but also to art. The exhibit of Walker Evans at Die Photographische Sammlung in Köln is a perfect case in point. Evans was a multi-talented photographer whose...

One could lament the fact that the burden of proof is greater on the injured, and thus they must be ever more careful in their assertions, or just proceed accordingly. When the anti-fracking magazine The Flowback contacted us, wanting pictures to illustrate its well-founded arguments against hydro-fracking, we should have...

Recently I went to a party with eminent scientists, mostly geologists and climatologists, from a major institute. A gathering of scientists is my dream scenario: Go from conversation to conversation with people who actually have some answers, and no small talk. They are a cautious lot by nature, always couching...

Documenta is a decadal European art fair that attempts to give an overview of the contemporary world art scene, or at least those aspects of it that the given curator (this year, Carolyin Christov-Bakargiev) finds most important. I recently attended the Venice Bienale, a similar event, and went away feeling...

Peter Gleick is a hero, and a man of gumption. It's amusingly ironic that he is being lambasted for using a slight deception to obtain documents from one of the foisters of the grand deception of our day -- the denial of climate change. The Heartland Institute has been doing...

It's autumn in the very east of Germany, just along the border with Poland. The train is a small regional, stopping in every town. They are generally picturesque, with small houses in the quaint German style, with a town center. The area seems not much changed since reunification.

This is...

The East Coast of the USA is a fairly agreeable place in the politico-geography of the planet. There are no wars, little crime, comparatively stable economy, and relative prosperity. People are accustomed to this calm and prosperity, and disruption unnerves and upsets. The media, of course, play to this, and...

In a seminal piece of writing, and a turning point in American journalism, Upton Sinclair exposed the atrocities of the meat-packing industry, which constituted a threat to public health, an extreme danger to the workers in the industry, and deplorably cruel treatment of animals. His monumental opus involved undercover research...

Flying from El Paso to Atlanta, the ground below appears to be covered with a patchwork quilt of white squares with white connecting lines between them. Thousands upon thousands, continuing endlessly into infinity. All gas drilling pads. And why should I care what they do in Texas? The land of...

One of the most interesting thing about carbon energy is its propensity for continuous monetization. The definition of sustainable energy includes perpetual utilization of the free. So of course capital has proportionally less interest in sustainability. And they're a clever lot, those wizards.

Massey Coal is an easy target with...

The Wizards of Finance are slowly backing away from mountaintop removal mining (MTR) like the well-brought up from a drunk, puking, distant cousin. A recent news item indicates that PNC bank will no longer finance the executors of this particularly heinous form of extraction. They follow the good...

As an avid connoisseur of bauxite sludge impoundments, I have studied with envy the photographs from the recent disaster in Hungary. Bauxite waste has a characteristic red color that is particularly photogenic, and I have traveled far and wide to find it. Environmental disasters range from the visible to the...

There is a hidden menace in your neighborhood, poisoning your water, creeping into your house and surrounding you and your family with a host of toxins: lead, mercury, cadmium and uranium.

Powerful interests are profiting from your ignorance of the facts and investing heavily in the continued lack of attention....

I write this sitting in a Boeing 757, jetting back from the Gulf to NYC. My name is Henry Fair, and I am powerless with petroleum. But I will try to do better.

The news is that BP has lowered a new, tight-fitting cap over the top of the...

People ask what it's like, and all I can say is, "It's worse than you can imagine."

And I don't really want to talk about it, because there is nothing I can really tell them, except perhaps to relate small personal recollections or impressions, and those disappear so quickly, or...