Friday I chatted with NYU professor, blogger, and media critic Jay Rosen as I began thinking about The Huffington Post's story about the letter from NASA retirees criticizing the agency's climate research. This transcript is meant to accompany my post on that topic.

SR: Did you follow this story at all as it happened?

Jay: yes, someone pinged me about the original
then I read Dave's
that's all I really know
just posted on Twitter about it

SR: OK, good. Did you see the editor's note they posted?

Jay: yes

SR: OK. So here's what I'm thinking:
Dave was sort of gentlemanly about it and said, "let's move on"
But I looked at that editor's note and thought, wait a minute

Jay: right

SR: They're now saying, "we agree with the agencies and experts who are concerned about the role of carbon dioxide"
Which is pretty much the same as saying, "We disagree with these NASA retirees"
yet the story played it totally straight, and still does, only now, instead of a lame "What do you think?" it ends with "here's what we think"

Photo by Jonathan Hynkle.

Today the Huffington Post won a Pulitzer Prize. Congratulations, Huffington Post! Now you're in the club. I'm sure the execs at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal who failed to take home any wins this year are teeth-gnashingly jealous.

But that's not what this post is about. What it takes to win Pulitzers, most of the time, is big budgets, smart reporters, and weighty topics of national import. But most of the stories that shape our national debates, and thereby our future, are nothing like this sort of award bait. Most of those stories are more like "NASA Global Warming Stance Blasted By 49 Astronauts, Scientists Who Once Worked At Agency," a short piece in The Huffington Post last week.

This article recycled a press release announcing that a bunch of former NASA employees, including some astronauts and scientists but no climate experts, had taken issue with the agency over its work on global warming. Findings that "man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated," the retirees charged. The article -- written not by one of HuffPo's famously uncompensated bloggers, but by its science editor, David Freeman -- didn't offer a single fact in rebuttal of the letter. But at the end, it asked: "What do you think? Is NASA pushing 'unsettled science' on global warming?"

It was a ludicrous postscript, one that abdicated the very purpose of science coverage. Journalists who specialize in science are our proxies to help us figure out what's trustworthy in realms where we lack detailed expertise ourselves and don't have time to acquire it. Asking for opinions online can be entertaining -- but the climate debate isn't the same thing as, say, weighing in on whether The Hunger Games movie did justice to the book.

(Photo by Chris Coomber.)

It's been way too long
since Grist's last haiku contest.
We're here to fix that.

Last time, we emerged
with Grist's official haiku.
Here it is for you:

A frog in water
doesn’t feel it boil in time.
Dude, we are that frog.

A fine haiku! Sure,
some may impugn its science.
We love its koan-

like flash of insight.
It served us well for years. But
its work here is done.

This Earth Day, Grist plans
To christen a new poem.
Will you help us out?

The earth's future could
hang on the syllables of
your five-seven-five.

Send us your haiku!
Email them to us right here.
Or just tweet them out.

(The hashtag "#gristku"
Will insure that we see them.)
Here's inspiration

in a video
from haiku master Dylan
Tweney. Now go write!

Who knows? Your words, too,
might end up immortalized
On a Grist T-shirt.

Photo by jonhoward.

Some of you liked "We Lost," our April Fools' item on green leaders throwing in the towel, but some of you didn't.

"April Fail," the comments read. "Stupidest idea ever. This is too big to joke about." "This scared the shit outta me until I realized the date. Don't do this to us." Over on Twitter, @BobbyHertz complained, "Awful April Fools' Joke, bad taste ... trivializes the fight for Climate Justice." Some readers reported tears.

Though we certainly didn't set out to make anyone cry, we'll never apologize for our attempts at humor here at Grist. We know some will work better than others, and one person's laugh is another one's gaffe. Chacon a son Grist.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing, the popular group-blog where she gets to link to stories about booze-based semiconductors or the science of farting. But her writing has always displayed two traits that give it power far beyond BoingBoing's geeky precincts: She's got a knack for explaining really complex science in an unintimidating way, along with a hardheaded Midwestern pragmatism that's tough to dismiss.

She brings both those qualities to Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before it Conquers Us, her new book about the choices we face in continuing to power our world without wrecking it. It's a fast, filling read that will arm you with a deeper understanding of the precariousness of our electricity grid, the distinction between efficiency and conservation, and the pros and cons of each of the energy sources we imagine as our savior. Koerth-Baker plants herself firmly in the climate-activist camp, but she knows how to talk across the political divide, and, refreshingly, her perspective is rooted in the heartland and draws examples from places like Kansas and Minnesota more than California and New York.

We've got an excerpt of Before the Lights Go Out for you, which looks at the relative importance of individual choice and policymaking in reforming our energy system. I collared Koerth-Baker via email to answer some questions the book raised for me about the climate debate, the possibility of dialogue, and the tenuousness of hope.

Our Grand Rolling Redesign of Grist continues today with some significant changes to the website that I wanted to run down for you.

We're taking the new page design that we introduced here on my blog (and more recently on David Roberts') and extending it throughout the Grist site. We're also introducing a new simplified Grist List design to match the new look. It's all about readability, flexibility -- and, yes, shareability (a tough word to love, but how else to say it?).

We've got lots of other new plans cooking too, including a new home page, new site navigation, and more. For the moment, you've got the current Grist home page design working alongside the new-model Grist article and post pages. This isn't because we're ambivalent; it's because we're trying to do all this right -- carefully, and in stages, and with plenty of time to correct course as needed.

So let us know what you think -- in comments below, by email, on Twitter or Facebook, via carrier pigeon or quadcopter, whatever works for you. We'll try to listen to it all.

The Supreme Court's marathon on health-care reform means that the pundits are going to be going all health care, all the time this week. And if reports from the court's arguments this morning are to be trusted, and the Supremes toss Obama's health program out the window, then we're going to be talking about this all year.

But before the legal weeds engulf us, it's worth stepping back to recall the wider issues at stake.

Faced with the programs and rules that make up a moderate, private-enterprise-friendly health-care reform program like Obamacare, the Red State id is throwing an individualist tantrum. Like the Tea Partiers shouting "Hands off my Medicare" to the government that runs the program, today's conservatives are deeply confused, and they are flailing in every direction at once. Mandates are unconstitutional! Save Medicare by ending it! Down with the death panels! Beware bureaucrats bearing broccoli!

This fight seems to be about mandates and dollars. But what's at stake is even more basic: Are we ever again going to be able to apply big collective solutions to our big collective problems?

The Climate Desk is a journalistic collaboration that Grist has been a part of since its inception in 2010, when a bunch of media outlets (in addition to us, that would be the Atlantic, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and PBS's Need to Know) decided that covering climate change was, in a sense, Bigger than All of Us.

Since then Climate Desk has served as both a clearing-house for the in-depth coverage of climate issues that all the partners are doing -- and also a testing ground for new approaches to telling the climate story.

Today the Climate Desk unveils a spiffy new website and begins a new phase of its existence, with a focus on producing original multimedia stories. Today, for instance, there's a great video about what's really behind President Obama's push to fill our gas tanks with algae.

Also, the Climate Desk collaborators are delighted to welcome the Guardian as our newest member!

We're cooking up a new project here at Grist, and I'd like to ask for your feedback and your help spreading the word about it.

When I came to Grist, as someone who was admittedly not an environmental-news specialist, I started looking around for a website or service that would show me, at a glance, a frequently updated selection of the trending headlines, news items and commentaries in the field. I was used to having this kind of tool at my disposal from my work in tech news, where Techmeme has been filling this need since 2005, and in political news, where Techmeme's sister site Memeorandum has long done the same.

These sites are driven largely by machine -- in other words, algorithms scan a flood of links and RSS items and tweets and draw up a portrait of the news and the conversation around it from a set of carefully selected sources. Human editors intercede at times to fix stuff the algorithm got wrong or to override its judgment with a more nuanced human-editorial hand. It's cyborg journalism -- not a replacement for original reporting, to be sure, but a highly useful adjunct.

I looked, but as far as I could tell, a green version of Techmeme didn't seem to exist. That left us with only one choice: We'd have to build it ourselves. And we're planning to!

When we're up and running, you'll be able to come to Grist at any hour of the day or night and scan a list of headlines and links to the newest and most important stories on the Web about sustainability, climate, cities, food, and other green issues. What news stories are brewing? What opinion pieces and blog posts are raising a ruckus? What are people talking about on Twitter and Facebook?

Our plan is to write the necessary software to power the back end of this service for Grist, and simultaneously share that software under open-source license for other people and organizations to use for their own needs. So the same technology that we're using at Grist could, say, get put to use by science bloggers or activists for human rights in China.

To make this work possible, we've submitted this idea to the Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge, and this is where we could use your help.

If you head on over to the Tumblr site where the Knight people are collecting and posting applications, you can read our pitch. If you have a comment for us, you can post it there. And if you like our idea, you can like it there too -- or reblog it if you're a Tumblr type yourself.

Knight wants to see what kind of support we can drum up from you, our community. So if our Fast Green News Machine sounds like something you'd want to use and you want Grist to create it, give us a hand. Thanks!

Here's some facts:

• Mike Daisey is a dramatic monologuist who traveled to Shenzhen, China, and created a successful one-man show based on the trip, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
• The show details harsh working conditions in China at the Foxconn factories that make Apple's iPhones and iPads.
• Daisey performed a shortened version of the show, "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," for a This American Life broadcast in January.
• Yesterday, This American Life announced that it was retracting the show.
• It turns out that Daisey's monologue, which seemed to document labor abuses firsthand, was full of fabrications, and that Daisey had lied to This American Life's fact-checkers in the course of preparing the show.
• Last night, This American Life broadcast and posted an utterly fascinating self-investigation about what happened and how it screwed up.

***

Stories have consequences. Today, the most effective journalists find and tell stories that make a difference in the world.

All stories are shaped by their creators. The notion that anyone can just "tell a story straight" is a delusion. I made an effort just now, above, to tell the Daisey story neutrally in a handful of bullet points. But everyone who knows the story and reads this summary will have questions about what bits I put in and which ones I left out, why I picked certain words and not others. And by the end I couldn't resist telling you how fascinating I thought the This American Life postmortem was.

So there's no such thing as a neutral story. But there is such a thing as an honest story.