Not long ago a daughter of mine suggested I try the tablet app Zite. It delivers an attractive personal magazine with a sophisticated type face and culled by some sort of robotic algorithm that triggers on the topics one chooses from a list. The stories are grabbed both according to their currency on the web and from one's own list of rss feeds. So its site says.
I loaded it and geared it for climate and science and auto news and some other interests. I quickly saw a bunch of aggregator mulch, recycled or from-the-source press releases, and low-grade blog entries and I rudely scoffed. Looks like automated cut and paste that doesn't pay anybody for anything it runs (sort of like we do here at the tracker, actually). I told her, initially, I already have systems that do better than that. But y'know? It's growing on me. It also turns up, in its mindless way, more than a few gems. It, like a few other apps of the same genre, is not so much mindful gatekeeper as disinterested valve that keeps volume well below fire hose level. The result is a random sample small enough to get through in a short time while exercising one's own judgment about what to read.
So, thank you daughter. Which brings up the latest gem:
- Grist – Wen Stephenson: Through a green glass, darkly / How climate will reshape American history ;
This is what the web was meant for. Except in long magazine articles one often does not have a chance to stretch one's legs in print without writing a book. Stephenson is a former editor at the Atlantic.com and at the Boston Globe's Ideas section, with additional time at NPR too, so this is a serious man. He has a review here of the book Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States, by historian Mark Fiege of Colorado State U. Stephenson calls the book magisterial. The review is a rave almost all the way through, praising the fat tome for looking at US History through the lens of interaction with nature and the different kinds of political mind sets that have resulted. The tendency of today's conservatives to scoff at the likes of the EPA is a focus of the professor's.
The capper is the surprising passages at the end just after Stephenson laments that Fiege did not include today's culture war over the reality and scope and cause of global warming. So he filled the hole with an email conversation with the author – who thus had time to put his answers into far more cogent and well-composed form than one might expect in a phone conversation. It amounts to an extension of the book's theme right up to this minute, including a reference to goings-on at the GOP convention. It's two liberals in the conversation, and as a fellow liberal it all sounds smart to me. More important of more general usefulness is that it is a muscular one-two punch: first the review, then the Q&A as a bonus.
– Charlie Petit
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