The Best of ’08 stories from Miller-McCune, where I’m a contributing editor, are up.
The Best of ’08 stories from Miller-McCune, where I’m a contributing editor, are up.
Dec 29th, 2008
A multibillion-dollar Chicago project provides a glimpse of urban poverty solutions that might actually make a difference. Ryan Blitstein takes a look in the February issue of Miller-McCune.
America, Europe, and the developing world are losing tens of billions of dollars to a cybercrime epidemic, and big business and governments are failing to protect us. Read Ryan Blitstein’s award-winning investigative series from the San Jose Mercury News.
Ryan’s controversial SF Weekly story about the much-vaunted site’s detrimental effects on the news industry, and founder Craig Newmark’s attempts to make things better.
When we argue about the use of torture, we often focus on waterboarding and other physical abuses. But an article in the Dec. 5 issue of Commonweal focuses on a really interesting pattern of actions that the national media has mostly missed: religious abuse.
Dec 16th, 2008
So apparently during the ’20s and’30s there was a magazine like The New Yorker that was based in Chicago, but it was swept into the dustbin of history until UofC cultural historian Neil Harris stumbled upon the archives a few years back. Details about his book, released last month: While browsing the stacks of the [...]
Last week I highlighted a great piece of Bloomberg reporting on America’s billions-wasted, failed agriculture policy. Since then, the rest of the seven-part series, Recipe for Famine, has been published online. Because Bloomberg did such a poor job of presenting its series, there’s no easy way to locate all the stories. So I’ve taken the [...]
Dec 12th, 2008
I had a Fast Company story come out last week on Houston’s $40m effort to shield itself from the current bear market, and to become less economically reliant on the volatile oil industry. It’s hard to predict how much a plan like this will work, but a new report from the local chamber of commerce [...]
Normally, a headline like the one above would be a gross exaggeration, and it would almost never appear in a mainstream U.S. publication. But lo and behold, the actual headline of a Bloomberg story by Alan Bjerga only just barely sugarcoats the situation. As it appears online, it’s “Dead Children Linked to Aid Policy in [...]
Dec 8th, 2008
I have such a technocrat’s-eye view of public policy that I’m constantly astounded at how often I come across fully addressable problems that are killing millions of people. I’m not talking about complex issues like urban poverty whose roots we don’t really understand. I mean situations where everyone agrees on the solution, the fix is [...]