timhettler.com

Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

Respect for nature’s fragility was an article of faith with me. Deploying superior firepower to crush local opposition to my plans for the land seemed a reckless act of environmental imperialism. Besides, these animals had arrived long before the gardener, so who was the interloper? And what was gardening about if not working out a more harmonious relationship with nature?

Cleveland would lose 177,000 inhabitants between 1970 and 1980, bottoming out at three-quarters of its post-WWII high population of 910,000.

Considering the state of the city in 1974, Bonda and his brain trust decided that, yes, Cleveland probably could use a drink.

Offering cheap booze to fans of a losing team. What could go wrong?

A whimsical look at how a few famous authors might write a JavaScript function that returns a fibonacci series of a given length. On Hemingway’s solution:

No surprises here. Code reduced to its essentials with no word or variable wasted. It’s not fancy; maybe its even a little pedantic - but that’s the beauty of Hemingway’s writing. No need for elaborate logic or clever variable names. It’s plain and its clear and it does what it has to - and nothing more.

Hemingway didn’t suffer fools gladly so if you ask for a series with less than two numbers he’ll just ignore you. “I’m tired and this question is idiotic”.

David Rakoff, a storyteller who could elicit peals of laughter and tears of sympathy with his personal accounts of Christmas Day mountain-climbing, studying Tibetan Buddhism with Steven Seagal, flying on the Concorde and grappling with his frailties, died on Thursday evening.

David Rakoff was one of my favorite contributors to This American Life. He will be missed.

Molly Laich ruminates on one of the smartest birds around. 

They evolved from dinosaurs, like all birds; you can see it in their feet and the shapes of their bones. A feather isn’t anything more than a modified scale. Crows, like ravens, are in the corvid family, along with their cousins, jackdaws, rooks, bluejays and magpies. Like humans, crows are warm-blooded, omnivorous scavengers. Technically, corvids are all songbirds, but more in the tradition of Tom Waits than Al Green. Crows can crudely mimic human speech or the dripping of a faucet.

What percent do you think the bottom 40% of Americans possess? And what about the top 20%? If you guessed around 9% for the bottom and 59% for the top, you’re pretty much in line with the average response we got when we asked this question of thousands of Americans. 

The reality is quite different.

For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting.