Patrick Boyle — Youth Today editor, colleague, and pal — has a new Huffington Post column up about his never-a-dull-moment struggles with fatherhood.
After his 7-year-old knocks him out during a game of Wii boxing and he can’t stop his virtual skateboard from careening into the river as his son laps him in PlayStation2, he realized he’s “aged into the scary side of children and technology.”
Read more about Patrick and follow his funny essays here.
There is a lot of heat and not much light when two politicians from opposite parties debate the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). While Democrats complain about Republicans’ hypocrisy in proudly spending ARRA funding they voted against, their GOP colleagues say the additional debt on top of the country’s trillion-dollar load when President Obama took office will ultimately be self-defeating.
That’s why we have journalists to sort things out.
Today’s contribution to the short-run debate (only history’s judgment will be definitive) comes from the New York Times’ David Leonhardt, who writes that ARRA almost certainly had its intended effect and then some. He looks at hard data and economic analyses, including those of conservatives, to say that on the jobs figures alone, the stimulus bill deserves a “big heaping of credit.”
He runs through the arguments that have made the measure unpopular and pretty much debunks each one by one, using as many facts as can fit in a newspaper column. It’s a reasoned, fair take on an issue that we need to get straight so we can decide what to do next: pass a weak jobs bill or admit that ARRA was a success and enact another, smaller sequel.
There is much talk these days about the missteps of climate change prognosticators (note to report writers, fact checkers and copyeditors are well worth the investment), but a Pew report released last week seeks to pour warm water on the newly emboldened doubters: a melting Arctic could cost $2.4 trillion by 2050.
The Pew Charitable Trusts Environment Group said the report — with a dateline of Iqaluit, Nanavut, Canada — for the first time quantifies the global cost of an Arctic that’s increasingly unable to adequately cool the climate.
Using a complicated figure to calculate the dollar estimates, researchers conclude that this region is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the earth. It could be what authors say is essentially a “feedback loop” caused by the loss of heat-reflecting sea ice and snow, which leads to more warming, more melting, and so on.
“Putting a dollar figure on the Arctic’s climate services allows us to better understand both the region’s immense importance and the enormous price we will pay if the ice is lost,” Dr. Eban Goodstein, co-author of the report, said in a statement. He’s an economist who directs the Bard Center for Environmental Policy at Bard College in New York. “At the mid-range of our estimates,” he said, “the cumulative cost of the melting Arctic in the next 40 years is equivalent to the annual gross domestic products of Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom combined.”
The latest Hunger in America report by Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, finds that one in eight people in the United States now rely on it for food and groceries.
The organization bills its Hunger in America report as the largest study of domestic hunger, with data from 61,000 client interviews and surveys of 37,000 feeding agencies.
The report says that hunger is increasing at an “alarming” rate in this country; the number of children in the Feeding America network alone has jumped by50 percent since 2006.
The network is feeding 1 million more Americans each week than it did in 2006. And 36 percent of households served have at least one person working, the report found. One-third of households report having to choose between food and other basic needs, such as rent, utilities, and child care, according to the report.
The report was authored by Mathematica Policy Research Inc.
“In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement” airs tomorrow night on PBS, but many clips are available. Pretty fantastic stuff.
Also, today is the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Coverage here, here, and here (in an article that underscores the enduring struggle to find leaders who do not disappoint).
Watch: Even in Digital Age, College Goal Sunday Still Fills Vital Need A Youth Today Original Video | (Read the accompanying article here.) By Jamaal Abdul-Alim
A colleague tells me a letter to the editor he wrote in December was victim, as was mine, to bad timing: his letter ran in The Washington Post the day after another snowstorm in December 2009. In case you missed it, here it is.
Patrick Boyle — Youth Today editor, colleague, and pal — has a new Huffington Post column up about his never-a-dull-moment struggles with fatherhood. 
There is a lot of heat and not much light when two politicians from opposite parties debate the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). While Democrats 
The latest 
