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Our inaugural open thread

I apologize for the barren postlessness of the blog today. Some of our editorial folk are out of town, and consequently the rest of us are swamped. Woe is us, I tell you.

So why don't we try one of those "open thread" things so popular on other blogs?

Talk amongst yourselves.

Gaghan’s Syriana not at all the feel-good film of the year

Syriana, written and directed by Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, is a brave and daunting piece of filmmaking. It plunges without apology into hot-button territory few U.S. news outlets, much less Hollywood productions, have dared explore, and does very little to smooth the rough edges for a moviegoing audience accustomed to frictionless entertainment. In a pop-culture […]

From Mascara to Montreal

Beyond eye shadow of a doubt Courtney Corvan may be the only Makeup Artist to the Stars who makes a point of using vegan, cruelty-free products. Funny, we thought being cruelty-free just meant not telling Rachel Hunter her pores are the size of planets. (Oh, Rachel, we kid.) Well, that’s ironicalicious Mazda recently announced that […]

Readers talk back about shade-grown coffee, composting toilets, veganism, and more

  Re: Buzz Alterin’ Dear Editor: You say that shade-grown is not a make-or-break aspect of coffee choice. It is if you want to see the Baltimore oriole. The species is declining by 4 percent a year because the trees it needs are being replaced by coffee plantations. Monoculture coffee plantations are a disaster for […]

Dismember the Maine

Rural Maine residents divided as spring-water bottler moves in An international corporation descending on a rural town, bent on extracting natural resources. Africa? South America? Nope: New England. Nestlé Waters North America Inc., purveyors of Poland Spring water, is prospecting for new sources of “blue gold” in the western Maine wilderness. Some fear the pumping […]

Heavy Metal Bummer

U.S.-owned plant contaminating Peruvian communities with heavy metals There’s heavy metal in Peru, but not the mullet-and-fake-satanism kind. Children in a Peruvian Andes mining town have high levels of toxic heavy metals in their bodies — and the likely source is an 83-year-old smelter owned by the St. Louis-based Doe Run Company. An independent study […]

Arrested Development

FBI arrests six from around the country for green-themed crimes It’s one of the biggest-ever busts for “ecoterrorism” (we’ll take the scare quotes off when someone gets hurt, thank you very much): On Wednesday, federal agents arrested six people in five states and indicted them on charges related to a string of property crimes in […]

At Least You Didn’t Kill Kyoto

Grist offers one last chance to clear your conscience Well, friends, this is it: the very last chance you’ll have to write off the wrongs of 2005 and enter 2006 with a fresh, clean slate. Over the past two weeks, donations and confessions have come pouring in, as Grist Indulgence-buyers have relieved themselves of guilt […]

Google Transit

I was going to write something about the just-debuted Google Transit -- a very cool new tool from Google that aspires eventually to have all the nation's local transit information in one easy-to-use tool -- but Jeremy Faludi went and did it for me. So go read that.

Montreal in a nutshell

Good quote:

"You are watching 163 nations do an elaborate dance to try to make progress when the United States is sitting in the middle of the road trying to obstruct," said Alden Meyer, a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that has long criticized the Bush administration's climate approach.

"It's getting to be like Charlie Brown with Lucy holding that football," he said. "Every time, at the last minute, the U.S. pulls it away."