‘True crime’ makes entertainment of tragedy

Rachel Monroe, January 17, 2023, CNN Editor’s Note: Rachel Monroe is a journalist and the author of “Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession.” Her work has appeared in Best American Travel Writing 2018, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere. CNN — For as long as humans have consumed media, we have been drawn to stories about …

Exploring the big myth of free-market neoliberalism

In 2010, the publication of “Merchants of Doubt” exposed how a small group of industry-backed scientists spread disinformation to undermine climate science. Now, the co-authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway are back with a new book exploring “The Big Myth” of free-market neoliberalism, and why those merchants were able to find the success they did. The key question? “How did so many Americans come …

Fracking Wastewater Causes Lasting Harm to Key Freshwater Species. Chevron talks about being “a water company that skims oil.”

Exposing water fleas, a critical link in the aquatic food chain, to fracking wastewater reduces their survival and ability to reproduce, with potentially far-ranging consequences, new research shows. February 21, 2023, By Liza Gross, Inside Climate News Extracting fossil fuels from underground reservoirs requires so much water a Chevron scientist once referred to its operations in California’s Kern River Oilfield “as …

Farmers of color urge Congress to fund land access

Feb 2023 by Ayurella Horn-Muller https://www.axios.com/2023/02/21/farmers-of-color-congress-land-access Farmers of color are calling on lawmakers this Congress to invest in equitable land access for the next generation. The big picture: They’re looking to the farm bill as a funding gateway to mitigate the federal government’s historic role in fueling racial disparities in farming and food sovereignty. In a first look for Axios, Holly Rippon-Butler, …

Stark Inequality More Harmful with Each Breath: People of Color Breathe More Hazardous Air. The Sources Are Everywhere

Researchers uncovered stark disparities between white people and minorities across thousands of categories of pollution, including trucks, industry, agriculture and even restaurants. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/climate/air-pollution-minorities.html By Hiroko Tabuchi and Nadja Popovich NYTimes.com, Published April 28, 2021 Updated Sept. 7, 2021 Over the years, a mountain of evidence has brought to light a stark injustice: Compared with white Americans, people of color in the United States suffer disproportionately …

Telecommuting not only saves time, it prevents pollution, unless workers start driving a lot of other places or opt to live and drive occasionally from further out

Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/22/telework-is-better-planet-federal-union-argues/…In particular, the American Federation of Government Employees points to research showing that telework curbs climate pollution caused by commuting in gas-powered cars (copied in further down). “We all know that personal automobiles are responsible for a tremendous amount of pollution through the burning of fossil fuels,”AFGE public policy director Jacque Simon told The Climate 202. “So every car trip not taken has …

Secrets of a Successful Flyer Keep it short. Here’s a rule of thumb: no paragraph should be longer than four lines long. Not four sentences—four lines. And don’t use more than two or three paragraphs. Use longer, descriptive headlines to get to the point right away. It’s better to say something like “Protect Our Benefits — Vote Yes to Authorize a Strike” …

Proposal would reward cities that take cops out of traffic stops

Black people are disproportionately pulled over and searched on US roads, according to an analysis of over 200 million traffic stops by the Stanford Open Policing Project. The encounters, which are the most common way police come into contact with the public, can turn violent. The police encounters that led to the deaths of Sandra Bland, Philando Castile and Daunte Wright all started …