If you're an American voter and you're still undecided today, please read this New Yorker editorial and think hard about it before you go to the polls:

The Choice

And to those of you for whom opposing abortion is the most important issue in this campaign, please ask yourselves honestly why protecting a horde of merely potential human beings who are more likely than ever to be born into crushing poverty is more important to you than ensuring that there is a clean, prosperous, and stable world for them to live on.

If you don't like abortion, don't have one, but please, for the sake of us all, don't let that get in the way of dealing with the real problems we face here in the real world. Real, feeling people are suffering in real, horrendous ways now. You are part of the world economy, and you are without doubt feeling the pain yourself.

If you vote only with the goal of ending access to abortion in mind, you may call yourself "pro-life," but in reality you are voting against life—against the lives of the real, breathing, thinking, suffering people who are your friends, family, and fellow humans.

Think hard.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, we're going to Schuba's tonight for this week's Field Museum Café Science lecture, on ancient climate change. The speaker is the brother of one of Laura's coworkers. Science and beer, what could be better?

People spend so much time and effort agonizing over things that are imaginary. Yes, it happens with Star Wars and the Marvel universe too, not just with religious topics, but at least Star Wars fans know Star Wars is made up. I think.

Man, what if all the brainpower we waste on this stuff were devoted to world peace instead, or to developing clean, renewable fuels. Too bad we didn't evolve to agonize over questions like those until they're solved.

Philadelphia Inquirer books editor Frank Wilson uses Cormac McCarthy as an excuse to peddle the rankest of bullshit in his column of yesterday:

Of course, as D.H. Lawrence pointed out in the last book he wrote, Apocalypse, those who warn of apocalypse secretly crave it, the way puritans tend to be turned on by the very vices they so loudly denounce.

The Road is just the latest installment in the pornography of despair.  [full diatribe]

Furthermore, in the balance of his column, Frank Wilson pretty much shames books editors everywhere by displaying his tin ear for brilliant, poetic prose, his utter lack of sophistication as a reader, and his blindness to symbolic content as he drops road apples all over The Road. Of course, if he denudes the book of its value as art, all that can remain in his cramped little mind is a perception of pornography. It's all in the eye of the beholder, after all. To me, pornography is American soldiers and Iraqi citizens dying unnecessarily while Washington watches, skies and seas poisoned as we blithely career down dead-end roads in our dead-end SUVs. Pornography is not contained, nor would be it even be containable, within the borders of The Road.

Today's Google logo for Earth Day is pretty poignant.

Our favorite paper news digest, The Week, has published this week's issue on the web, for free, without a paper version:

For one week only, The Week has published a full issue exclusively online, bringing a bonus issue to you at reduced impact to the environment.

(But the really bad part is, this issue is not so well suited for bathroom reading.)

From the New York Times:

From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency's mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush's goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the "understand and protect" phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.  [full article]

Roger Ebert throws up his hands in response to readers who took issue with his review of An Inconvenient Truth:

I cannot get into a scientific discussion here. There will be no end to it. All I can say is, the Gore documentary made a deep impression on me. I urge you to see it. You will not be seeing a "campaign film," or "sour grapes," or "Gore still being bitter." George W. Bush has repeated for six years that global warming "requires more study." If Gore has spent six years studying it, aren't his findings worthy of attention? Yes, I'm "being political." But saying the issue "needs more study" is a political statement when energy groups are among your major supporters and your family is in the oil business.  [full response]

I began thinking about global warming again today, sparked by a posting by Christopher Bigelow—or rather, by a couple of the complacent jackasses who responded to the post. (Sorry if they're friends of yours, Chris.)

While I think it's nice that Time did finally get around to covering the story in a big way, I think the three-part New Yorker series by Elizabeth Kolbert that ran a year ago was much better and should be required reading. Before I lose them again, here are the links to the Kolbert stories:

• "The Climate of Man—I"
  
• "The Climate of Man—II"
  
• "The Climate of Man—III"

Me neither.

A "Talk of the Town" piece by Kolbert from the March 20th New Yorker continues the saga. She details the findings gleaned from two satellites nicknamed Tom and Jerry that measure changes in the earth's gravitational field, and these measurements tell us that Antarctica is losing water at an alarming rate—more than anyone suspected. She concludes:

A project like Tom and Jerry demonstrates all the strengths of American science: technological sophistication, restless curiosity, and monumental budgets. But, at the same time, it points to the fundamental disconnect in our culture. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to produce such an elegant set of measurements only to ignore them? With knowledge comes responsibility, and so it is that we turn from the knowledge we have gone to such lengths to acquire.

Hell, I don't blame you for not wanting to think about it. I sure don't want to think about it.