If you were looking for calm reassurance over the standoff with North Korea today, cable news wasn’t your friend.

Full-size version.

Now that I have your attention, I want to make a simple point about the intersection of journalism and public goods.

This week we were treated — and I mean that sincerely — to a conservative show of support for a White House proposal to fund the mapping of the human brain. Unfortunately it comes at a time when conservative trolling of less grandiose, publicly funded scientific research is at a historic high*.

So while President Obama hit a sweet spot with the BRAIN project, the right has simultaneously been in hysterics about the National Science Foundation funding a study of duck genitals. Well that study, it turns out, yielded some interesting results, including new information about the evolution of duck vaginas into the shape of clockwise corkscrews, to fend off forced copulation by male ducks, which have counter-clockwise, corkscrew shaped penises. Fascinating! Read More

Roger Ebert, the great film critic, has died. He was 70.

Remembering Martin Luther King.