Where Victory Lies

Of all the revelations, this is the conversation I remember from a September day almost 10 years ago. I was driving home from school with my daughters; they were 4 and almost 7, and the news a few days after the attacks was relentlessly grim: body counts and a smoking, toxic ruin and cars unclaimed at suburban train stations because Mom or Dad never came home from work that day

Share

Fast Five Carjacks the Box Office with a Furious $83.6 Million

What did it take to wake up the Rip Van Winkle box office, asleep for the past 20 or more weeks? Just some fast cars, faster women, a bank vault dragged through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, more wasting of fuel than in the BP oil spill and two bald giants — Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — kicking the crap out of each other.

Share

Visiting Chernobyl 25 Years Later: Lessons for Fukushima

The 18.5-mile radius around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is known officially as the “zone of alienation.” Abandoned cars, tractors, buildings and homes litter the landscape and are slowly being devoured by trees and shrubs. A classroom bulletin board not far from the central Lenin Street in the town where the plant workers used to live reads, “No return

Share

Nuclear Batteries

Nuclear-powered cars! airplanes! Fridges and freezers! In the heady days of the early 1950s — at the dawn of the civilian nuclear power age and President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program — nuclear optimists imagined a world powered by tiny nuclear reactors. Today, in an era of climate change and energy insecurity, the nuclear industry is dusting off some of those old dreams.

Share