Commentaries

One of my habits in recent years has been studying climate history in my free time. What can I say; it keeps me out of bars.

Recently, I was startled to learn that the temperatures experienced by American wheat farms back in the 1830s were almost 7 degrees warmer than they now are.

At first I thought I had misread that statistic. After all, we know that temperatures in our country have been on the uptick since 1850 when North America emerged from a cooler era. And, surely, if climate scientists are right, temperatures in just the past couple of decades are clearly up from what they used to be.

So how could modern American wheat farmers be facing much colder climes than they were in the 1830s?

Dr. Lawrence Pintak, Founding Dean of The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, responds to the recent This American Life controversy surrounding their story on Apple's manufacturing practices in China. This commentary appeared today in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Over the weekend, as just about anyone with electricity knows by now, the public radio program This American Life fell on its sword over its bad Apple episode. The gesture was a noble one. As CJR’s Ryan Chittum put it:

In today's economy, many Americans have to get by on less.  That means learning new strategies for saving money and living without.  NWPR commentator Corinna Nicolaou talks about growing up poor, and the ways in which wealth may really be a state of mind.