Articles by David Roberts

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 […]

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."