Articles by Katharine Wroth

Who’ll win the coveted Flat Earth Award?

We chuckled when Bill McKibben mentioned the new Flat Earth Award on this site in January, and now we're positively whooping with anticipatory glee. The winner of the prize -- which was devised by a handful of Middlebury students to spotlight a public figure in deeeeeeep denial of global warming -- will be announced next week. The three nominees are: oh-no-he-didn't author Michael Crichton; oh-yes-he-did gasbag Rush Limbaugh; and oh-give-me-a-break naysayer Fred Singer. So go on, cast your vote now, and give one of these fatheads -- uh, flatheads -- his due!

P.S. Got any thoughts about who else should have been nominated? We're all ears.

We can’t make this stuff up

Funny thing: We thought about writing something like this and slipping it in as one of our April Fool's stories. But we knew no one would buy it.

Will KIA’s ads give car sharing a boost?

Last night, mindless TV called. An ad came on that I've seen before, but never focused on. It's for the KIA Sportage (which I really want to pronounce with a lovely French accent), and shows a series of people driving the same car, tossing the keys to each other as they go. Wow: car sharing hits prime time! This is almost as good as hybrids on Alias.

I know, I know, I'm being too literal. KIA's point is simply that this vehicle works for all kinds of different people. But along the way, the company makes sharing a car look pretty darn zippy. Maybe it'll get viewers thinking ... (naw -- see first line).

Head and shoulders above the rest

As I was waiting for the bus this morning, I glimpsed this headline: 'Is that Dandruff in Your Air Pollution'? It's such an unsurprising concept -- that particulate matter in the air includes stuff like dandruff and fur -- that it hardly seems newsworthy. And yet. The image of all of us wading through a haze of skin chunks is somehow tough to, er, swallow. I can't help but think of all those salmon swimming through each other's lice -- and how I had the temerity, when we reported that the other day, to think it was strange.