Articles by Jess Zimmerman

Obama blows smog in everyone's face

President Obama has yanked back the EPA's proposed new restrictions on ground-level ozone (i.e. smog). That's a huge win for Big Business, which had claimed it couldn't weather an economic downturn AND keep from suffocating people at the same time. But it's an equally huge loss for everyone else -- especially since the reason the EPA was revising the smog standards in the first place was because the allowable limit was well above safe levels, according to the agency's science advisors.

Raising chickens is totally rock and roll

Jenifer Jourdanne has expensive tastes, expensive shoes, and "designer chickens." In an essay in xoJane, she talks about how her long-standing backyard coop didn't dent her rocker cred:

I will have you know I was a maverick. I was the girl in the early 90s at Viper Room where people would say things like “Slash, come over here, no really, this chick has pet chickens!" I mean I am sure they probably thought I used them in an adult act but sorry to bore you, they just walk around my herb gardens looking for snails.

Are vegetarians more fun in the sack?

Apparently vegetarians do eat meat. Data from the online dating site OKCupid indicate that vegetarians enjoy giving oral sex more — or anyway, they say they do. There are all sorts of causation and correlation-based theories we could attempt here, but we'll just let your imaginations run wild. We'll simply note that, inevitable confounding factors […]

Climate convert says deniers are dumb

In a beautifully written post on Climate Crocks, former skeptic D.R. Tucker illuminates the way that far-right climate change denialism encourages and feeds off of science-phobia. Tucker is clearly far from stupid, but he wonders if stupidity is a required characteristic for climate change denial -- not because there's really an IQ requirement, but because denialists glorify ignorance and roll their eyes at complexity. That's appealing to dumb people, surely. But it's also appealing to people who lack for good science education or who think they're dumb at science, and who feel disadvantaged and judged because of it. Climate deniers like Rush Limbaugh make them feel like that's an asset, not a flaw.