Articles by David Roberts
David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
All Articles
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A new essay
What follows is a new essay by Bill McKibben, addressing -- in the context of reviewing five new books -- just how close we are to ecological catastrophe, and what reasons there are for hope.
The essay will appear in the Nov. 16 edition of the New York Review of Books. The NYRB editors gave Tom Engelhardt's excellent TomDispatch permission to publish it in advance; he in turn gave me permission to run it here. Thanks to Tom and to the NYRB editors.
Don't miss this one.
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Who’s doing what
It's official: Obama is thinking about running. Of course the knock against him -- the only one that will stick, I imagine, but a big one -- is his lack of experience. For my part, I tend to think that character and circumstance define a presidency. Presidents are out of their depth the minute they walk into the office. No one is ever prepared to become the world's most powerful human being. It's how they react, who they hire, what kind of people they are, and above all, what happens in the world around them that ultimately matters.
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The one does not get the other
The mainstream media has a bead on the blogosphere. They've got their story.
"The blogs" is now short-hand for "conspiricists, wackos, and (worst of all) partisans." If a nightly news producer needs something slightly outre said, something outside the orbit of polite political dialogue, "the blogs" are happy to say it for them. There are, after all, a lot of blog posts. They're bound to say anything.
This makes the media lazy. Exhibit A: CBS Nightly News did a story on the widespread belief that Bush & Rove are manipulating gas prices in advance of the mid-term elections. We're told the blogs are fairly abuzz with suspicion.
For this, they mustered two blog screenshots:
