Grist List
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The year in crazy: Rush Limbaugh
Oh Rush, you never fail to make us lolsob. And for this reason you are Media Matters' Totally Full of Shit Guy of the Year, which is not what they call it but I think we all know what they mean. The Media Matters team has concocted a delightful romp through Limbaugh's 2011 crazy (which […]
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Here’s your holiday reading!
It is getting so close to that magical week between Christmas and New Year's where offices are either closed or abandoned by the vast majority of employees, and no work gets done. Whether you plan to be snuggled on a couch by an open fire or logging truncated days of semi-productivity in a half-empty office, […]
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This Chicago park will be almost 10 times as big as Manhattan
On Chicago's South Side, 140,000 acres of brownfields and other underused land are just sitting there. But Illinois is putting $17 million into turning that fallow ground into what will be the largest city park in the lower 48. (Alaska has one that's bigger.) The park will be called the Millennium Reserve and will promote […]
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Critical List: Seattle bans plastic bags; at least 100 million trees died in Texas this year
Seattle is banning retail stores from giving out single-use plastic bags. Paper bags will cost a nickel. Google is investing $94 million in solar projects. As many as 500 million trees died in the Texas drought this year. India could join the U.S. in officially complaining that China's been selling solar panels at too low […]
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Willie Nelson wants you to occupy Big Food
No less an authority than Willie Nelson is writing in the Huffington Post, calling on people to Occupy the Food System. Big Agriculture is just as one-percenty as the banks, says Nelson, with most of the resources concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations — and the government isn't doing anything to help. Our […]
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Giant smiley measures a city’s mood
The Fühl-o-meter (Feel-o-meter), also known as the Public Face, is an art installation, which is probably good because if it were an official civic amenity it might be a little Orwellian. But as art it’s cool! The idea is that cameras scan the faces of people passing through the city, and analyze their expressions to […]
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Germans turn nuclear power plant into Disneyland
The "nuclear renaissance" is here, only it looks like a whirling swingset ascending the interior of a massive cooling tower at what used to be a 327-megawatt fast breeder reactor in Germany. Business is so good at the park — 600,000 visitors a year — that its owner is working on a "winter annex" inside […]
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Feds approve Shell’s plan to spill oil in the Arctic
The Obama administration just approved Shell Oil's plan to drill for oil in the Arctic, and even though it got its way, the company is still whining about "unwarranted restrictions" attached to this approval (it can't drill when winter ice is present, boo fucking hoo). Drilling for oil is challenging even under "normal" circumstances, so […]
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Heavy metal sucks; this device eliminates it
Heavy metal, as in the music and the cartoon movie with all the boobs, is still cool. (YES IT IS.) But heavy metals, as in heavy metals, are not very popular on account of being toxic. Luckily engineers at Brown are also cool (YES THEY ARE), and have devised a new way to remove heavy […]
