Bill McKibben, a writer for The New Yorker, has emerged as the leader of the popular movement to get us to give up fossil fuels. He is the founder of 350.org, which is intent on returning the amount of carbon…

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein led what was then the fourth largest army in the world, a battle-hardened group that had just fought the ten-year Iran-Iraq War, into Kuwait to seize its oil fields. It was a clear violation of…

The November elections could be watershed. The Republicans have a very good chance of taking the Senate, which would be a complete rejection of the Obama years and set the stage for winning back the Presidency in 2016. Then we…

There’s a situation going on down in Texas right now that deserves everyone’s attention, even though it hasn’t received much notice in the press. The Kurds are a gritty minority in the Middle East, surviving in a barren swathe of…

Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi visits shelters housing the thousands of children streaming across the border from Central America and says, “We’re all North Americans” and she’d like to take them all home with her. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont…

In 1980, under the first administration of Governor Jerry Brown, California decided it wasn’t going to build any more power plants but would follow Amory Lovins’ “soft path,” opting instead for conservation and renewable energy. By 2000, with the new…

As everyone knows, the easiest way for a scientist to get his or her name in the paper these days is to make a prediction about global warming. Miami will be underwater, millions will die of starvation, giraffes will be…

In 1964, at the age of 22 and just out of college, I went to Mississippi as part of the Freedom Summer effort that broke the back of Jim Crow society, setting off what I still think was probably the…

No Messing With Death by Jesse Walker The typical conservative is well informed about the careless errors routinely made by the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Postal Service, and city hall. If he’s a policy wonk, he may have bookmarked…

One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future By Ben Carson, M.D. (Sentinel, 256 pages, $25.95) Just for the record, here’s a list of the jobs that Dr. Ben Carson held before he had graduated from Yale…