Ten years ago, I was one of a group of activists fighting the world’s largest hazardous waste incinerator. We were in the middle of an eye-gouging street brawl with the new Clinton administration, which had broken its promise to shut the burn box down. The incinerator was in a poor neighborhood, next to a school, […]

A woman with whom I went to high school is an astronaut in the space shuttle program. When the Columbia broke apart over Texas a few weeks ago, I – and I suppose a number of people in our graduating class – passed moments of heightened anxiety until we learned she was not on board. […]

I’m writing this on Wednesday morning; I’ve got a deadline to meet. In the next office, a public-interest health care advocate is preparing legislative testimony on medical malpractice insurance. Her documents show jury awards for medical malpractice are not outrageous, as some doctors and the insurance industry would have us believe. The rising cost of […]

The Bronze Age lasted 2,500 years; the Iron Age 1,100. As technology becomes more sophisticated one age is quickly overtaken by the next. What should we call the period dominated by petroleum products? “Age” seems too expansive a term for what will be an eyeblink of history; perhaps we should call it the “Oil Moment.” […]