If you were looking for calm reassurance over the standoff with North Korea today, cable news wasn’t your friend.
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
Thought it seems extremely difficult to believe the two Texas prosecutor killings aren’t connected, there are key differences in how the two killings were carried out.
If you need a cuteness/heart-warmingness injection, click below … Read More
I’ll be doing a Live Chat today at 5:15 PM at TPMPrime. Get in your questions now and join me tomorrow evening.
Also, don’t miss Richard Socarides Live Chat next Tuesday. Get questions in now.
Pew finds majority support for pot legalization for the first time.
It’s been ten years since Michael Kelly died as the first reporter to die in Iraq. I remember it vividly because I found out a couple hours before the news was reported and decided not to report it until his family and publication had a chance to do in their own way. His death was a terrible blow to his family and many colleagues who treasured him as a colleague and editor. But there’s simply no denying that, as a writer and columnist, he’d degenerated into something very much like a crank. Hectoring, shallow, nasty and fatuous.