Fifty years ago, a Johns Hopkins–educated zoologist did something that few at the time thought was possible. With the publication of one book, she started a national debate about the universally accepted use of synthetic pesticides, the irresponsibility of science, and the limits of technological promise. She also challenged the metastatic growth of the synthetic […]

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Reviewed: Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars Is More Important Than Winning Them by David Keen (Yale University Press, 312 pp., $38). Heraclitus said that war is the father of all things, and though the great Greek’s utterances are  wisdom for the ages, this one-liner is way past its sell-by date. Sure, war is undeniably the big daddy of bigger military […]

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Reviewed: Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell (PublicAffairs, 320 pp., $26.99). Sixty percent of Republicans do not believe in evolution. Only 11 percent of Tea Party supporters think man-made climate change is real. But according to Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, authors of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and […]

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Reviewed: Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, by Linda Hirshman (Harper, 464 pp., $27.99). Wear at least three “gender-appropriate” garments to the bar or risk a police bust. Get booted from the Army for loving a consenting adult. Marry your beloved and keep paying the IRS as though you were single. The spectrum of humiliations and civil […]

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In “A Brodner Minute,” illustrator-animator Steve Brodner‘s series of satirical videos for The Washington Spectator, Brodner twits everyone in his path. No one is safe—from Rudy Giuliani to Mitt Romney, Arizona governor Jan Brewer to fatcat donors, Grover Norquist to Newt Gingrich. Below, Spectator interns Annie Jones and Renae Lesser ask the artist a few questions about his work. AJ: You studied fine […]

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