The Fracturing of Pennsylvania

In Amwell Township, your opinion of fracking tends to correspond with how much money you’re making and with how close you live to the gas wells, chemical ponds, pipelines and compressor stations springing up in the area. Many of those who live nearby fear that a leak in the plastic liner of a chemical pond could drip into a watershed or that a truck spill could send carcinogens into a field of beef cattle. (According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, 65 Marcellus wells drilled this year have been cited for faulty cement casings, which could result in leaks.) But for many other residents, including Haney’s neighbors, the risks seem small, and the benefits — clean fuel, economic development — far outweigh them.

On a Saturday morning in July 2011, Bill Hartley’s Styling Shop bustled with clients — a truck driver, a leaseholder, a landowner — all of whom profited from the gas boom. One was Ray Day, 64, a ginger-haired farmer, who, along with his brothers and sisters, owns nearly 300 acres of Amwell Township. Thanks to the money he received from allowing Range Resources to drill, build a compressor station and dig a chemical pond on his land, he has been able to reroof two barns, buy a new hay baler and construct an addition to his house for his 94-year-old mother. “I only buy something if I can pay cash,” Day said later. And he still has plenty of money left over. Was he planning a vacation, maybe to Florida? Day snorted good-naturedly. “Farmers don’t go to Florida,” he said.

Published: Nov 17, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,795 words)

Tough Times at Newsweek

Resuscitating a battered newsweekly in 2011 is a tough bit of business. Last year, The Daily Beast and Newsweek lost a combined $30 million. Ad page numbers tell how difficult it is, too: Newsweek’s ad page performance between April to September was down 18 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau quarterly report. This is easy to dismiss (what isn’t down these days!) — but Time is up 4 percent for the year, The Economist is flat and Newsweek is competing, year-over-year, against a version of itself that had an ownership change, a lame duck editor and a very uncertain future.

Source: WWD
Published: Nov 18, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,094 words)

It Does Take a Village

Hrdy’s book cannot resolve questions concerning the mental health of children not cared for by their mothers, but it provides a relevant cross-cultural and evolutionary perspective on such care. First, the ethnological record shows that the nuclear family, although not rare, has not been common either, and it has always occurred within a broader social setting. Polygynous families (with two or more wives), polyandrous families (with two or more husbands), extended families under a single roof, mother-child households in a compound comprising several wives of a powerful man, and other arrangements have long shown that isolated nuclear households—mom, dad, kids—are not necessarily the human norm.

Likewise, the working mother has always been a central part of the human scene, and the classic stay-at-home mom of 1950s television may have been limited to Western cultures in that era. Women gathered, gardened, farmed, fished, built huts, made clothing and other necessities, even hunted in some cultures, in addition to caring for children and performing other domestic duties. Mothers often could not discharge these duties without help. Our species is not unique in caring for offspring cooperatively, but our great ape cousins don’t do it, and we take it to extraordinary levels.

Published: Dec 8, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,352 words)

What Is Sony Now?

There’s more to Sony’s problems than acts of God and currency traders. The maker of the Walkman and the Trinitron hasn’t driven pop culture for years. Sony thrived in an era of stand-alone electronics. When the Internet arose and digital began to mean connected, iPods became the center of people’s entertainment lives, then smartphones and tablets—which Sony was late to produce. Even the quintessential Sony product—the TV set—has become a millstone. Sony has lost nearly $8.5 billion on TVs over eight years and expects to keep losing at least into 2013. Samsung, Vizio, and other upstarts have driven prices so low that one Sony executive says the company charges less for some TVs than it cost to ship them a few years ago.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Nov 17, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,562 words)

Inquiry Grew Into Concerns of a Cover-Up

Officials at the Second Mile, the charity for at-risk children that Sandusky founded and that prosecutors say he used to target victims, reported that several years of the organization’s records were missing and had perhaps been stolen. The missing files, investigators worry, may limit their ability to determine if Sandusky used charity resources — expense accounts, travel, gifts — to recruit new victims, or even buy their silence, according to two people with knowledge of the case.

And in 2002, after McQueary had reported what he had seen to the university’s senior officials, those officials not only never told the police, but they also never even informed the university’s top lawyer. That lawyer, Wendell Courtney, said in an interview this week that he would have been duty bound to report to law enforcement officials any allegations of inappropriate conduct toward children by Sandusky.

Most disturbingly, investigators continued to identify possible victims — young men who had been boys when Sandusky befriended them through his foundation for troubled youngsters.

Author: Jo Becker
Published: Nov 16, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,867 words)

Gryphon

[Fiction] On Wednesday afternoon, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourthgrade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter — dazed and infrequent — sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see Mr. Hibler’s face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. I’l bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.”

Source: American Story
Published: Nov 1, 1985
Length: 26 minutes (6,518 words)

Teaching Good Sex

In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a “force for good” — even for teenagers — this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States. “There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed,” said Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”

Across the country, the approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”

Published: Nov 16, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,373 words)

Shovel-Ready Clinics

As Congress and the president have acknowledged, the way to meet the flood of new patients coming down the pike is to expand the nation’s existing network of community health centers— nonprofit clinics that offer primary care to the medically under-served, often in rural areas or inner cities. But to get this done, there’s no need to appropriate billions more in direct government spending. Rather, there is a way to lure skittish banks into lending private capital to finance a health center construction boom in all fifty states, simply by tweaking the language of an existing federal lending program. Doing so would save money in the long run by providing cost-effective primary care to those who desperately need it. And it would quickly create tens of thousands of jobs, many of them in the hard-hit construction sector. Moreover, unlike the roads, bridges, and other complex infrastructure projects the Obama administration wants to fund, few of which are shovel ready, health center projects could get the hammers swinging in months, not years.

Published: Nov 1, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,841 words)

Nicholas Evans: ‘Guilt is My Subject. I’ve Taken Research to an Extreme Degree’

The following morning all four awake feeling not quite right. By lunchtime they are seriously ill. They consult a book in the kitchen – a guide to wild mushrooms – and leaf through until they find a photograph. Anxiously they scan the text, and see the chilling words: deadly poisonous.

The local GP is called urgently. The four are rushed into the local Highland hospital in Elgin. Ambulances race them down to the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. On the journey the man begins to convulse, his body shuddering and shaking uncontrollably. He fears he is about to die.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Nov 13, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,467 words)

Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?

In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Published: Nov 24, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,193 words)