Articles by Sarah van Schagen

From Inconvenient to Indiana

Don’t hate the narrata, hate the game Much to the surprise of playa hataz, An Inconvenient Truth — starring the allegedly “stiff” Al Gore — is doing gangbuster box office, boasting the industry’s highest per-screen average. This is driving certain parties nuts, leading to incoherent screeds and comparisons of Gore to both Goebbels and Hitler. […]

Gore’s new book is full of truths, pretty pictures

I hold in my hand a copy of Al Gore's new book An Inconvenient Truth. Though subtitled "The planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it," this is not the photo-less, textbookish, only-a-few-graphs-and-charts-to-save-you from the sea-of-endless-sentences-and-paragraphs-of-boring-text that you might have (and I definitely) expected. This is a coffee-table book, people! There are pretty, pretty pictures! And fonts large enough for crotchety Aunt Edna to read!

Seriously, though, this book is like the paper-incarnation of Gore's slideshow presentation -- which, I realize, does not sound like a rousing endorsement ... but if you've seen the movie you know it is. Like the slideshow (and movie), this book is extremely well done, with information easy to understand and graphic data impossible to ignore. The book has a high photo-to-text ratio -- often featuring two-page photo spreads with a sentence or two of explanatory text. Throughout the 320-some page book are fold-out pages that create wider space for graphs and photos or reveal some "surprising" fact.

Even the cover folds out, revealing Gore (in all his smart-and-dreamyness) standing against a black background and dwarfed by the iconic photo of the earth from space. Just below the earth, this text:

From Trust Fundies to Travel Finds

Snow job College Republican chapters across the country have begun hosting “Global Cooling Day” events to debunk the myths deny the facts about global warming. There are kiddie pools, sand, girls in bikinis, even free snow cones. Ah, rich white kids — never funnier than when they’re mocking the disease and death awaiting the global […]

From Dems to Diva

It’s just a jump to the left Welcome to Grist List’s time-warp edition! This week, Al Gore and both Clintons made noise about global warming and energy policy. For a sec we thought we’d been transported to 1996, but then we realized: a decade ago, they weren’t saying a damn thing. Photo: AP/Denis Paquin. And […]