Ryan Cooper

He's done .

One of the great things about working at the  Monthly , which I assume is also true of most other such publications, is that people randomly send you free books. Here's a review of a really bad one I did just for fun. Back in May, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote : As the details of the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden [come out], it was inevitable that somebody would observe (as many people did), that the operation was going to make a really fantastic action movie. Such a movie would be really hard to get right: it could easily be a cheap action picture, when this coda to the brokenness of our last ten years deserves a profound piece of art. It was thus with some trepidation that I picked up Kill bin Laden , by John Weisman. Not knowing anything about the author, I had no idea what to expect. Would this be the profound piece of art the last miserable decade deserves? That would be an emphatic no . If, as Roger Ebert says , Nicholas Sparks writes "soft porn for teenage girl...

On the subject of climate change deniers, Paul Krugman nails it : "Think about climate change. You have various right-wingers simultaneously (a) denying that global warming is happening (b) denying that anyone denies that global warming is happening, but denying that humans are responsible (c) denying that anyone denies that humans are causing global warming, insisting that the real argument is about the appropriate response."

It is freezing cold here in DC; you might be able to see that it's snowing outside. We spent the afternoon hanging around the Natural History and Air & Space museums. For me I think the latter is cooler. If I can make a recommendation, the "How Flight Works" display, though it's a bit cheesy and sponsored by Boeing, is actually pretty interesting. Someone with a serious science background clearly designed and fact-checked the displays. They avoid a lot of the usual myths about flight and even dispel some of my pet peeves (the "equal transit time" explanation, for example). Good stuff.

I was a bit confused recently because I saw this on Rachel Maddow, but Amanda Marcotte clears it up for me : I don't know if you want to have some staff look into this, but hormonal forms of birth control work a little differently. They actually prevent implantation, not conception. I saw this exchange posted everywhere with absolutely no correction of this blatant (if unintended) misinformation. Even Jezebel’s write-up unfortunately implied that killing fertilized eggs is an evidenced mechanism of the pill, and that it happens frequently, which it doesn’t. They made it worse by making fun of Mitt Romney for not knowing how the pill works. The problem with that is he actually showed a better understanding of it than either the woman asking him a question or the Jezebel writer. If you make fun of someone for being wrong, but they’re actually right, then you’re the one with egg on your face. I get why feminists are allowing anti-choice misinformation to find home in our mouths. We ...

Ok, not quite. But this is awesome:

According to the Great Gazoogle , there are geothermal resources in the United States with approximately 10 times the energy potential than all currently existing coal-fired power plants. No, really: As part of that effort, the Mountain View, California-based company’s philanthropic arm, “Google.org,” on Tuesday published a new Google Earth map of the geothermal resources in the continental United States, created from data collected by the Geothermal Laboratory at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, which received a $489,521 grant from Google for the project. The new map, an update of a running one that SMU scientists prepared in 2004 and 1992, estimates that the technical potential of geothermal in the U.S. is nearly 3 million megawatts (2,980,295), or 10 times the capacity of all the installed coal power plants in the country today. It’s available to view in an image format and also as a downloadable KML layer file for Google Earth. Ok, apparently it would take 10-...