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I really did not want to see Before the Flood , even though I teach several courses that relate directly to it. I pictured myself viewing it like a kid (or me) at a scary movie, watching through little gaps between my fingers as I try to shield my eyes from the screen. I have watched An Inconvenient Truth  and its sequel a few times, and even with Al Gore's dry presentation, I found it nervous-making, at least. Melting Arctic ice. Some parts of the film actually are pretty frightening. So when I heard that a real film-maker had produced something very convincing about climate change, I knew that I had to see it and would want to avoid it, at the same time. Given the dramatic potential of climate change, I feared being sucked into an experience that would manipulate audience emotions with dramatic music and images of peril. Thankfully, this film does none of that, and I managed to watch it three times in a ten-day period, without being scarred. DiCaprio documents his travels as the

Although described by Huffington Post as squashing the question , author and NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten is gracious in his conversation with a C-SPAN listener who called in to suggest "vetting" migrants from Puerto Rico. Gjelten ignores the racist undertones of a call that begins by praising migrants from Norway and then goes on to suggest that migrants from Puerto Rico need extra screening. Rather, Gjelten patiently explains the difference between migration and immigration -- people from Puerto Rico cannot immigrate to the United States because they are already here. Gjelten takes it easy on the caller for two reasons. One is that his style is naturally inclusive, and he is used to conversations with people of many different ideological persuasions -- so he glides past the "good" immigrant memories in order to get to the teachable moment.. The other reason might be that he knows the breadth of geographic ignorance in the United States, even regarding our own co

Lipstick on the collar Strange phone calls and hang-ups Working late far too often Business travel with an attractive co-worker You get the picture... No one of these things proves an affair, but a pattern draws suspicion. Hire a PI, and the pattern is confirmed. Hire 100 PIs, and 97 of them agree. This still proves  nothing, but the next strange event will be hard to ignore. I watched the Leonardo DiCaprio film Before the Flood  three times in the past couple weeks -- twice with classes and once with my spouse (and fellow climate-change scholar). At the end of this period, our New England weather was swinging wildly -- not setting record highs or lows for these December days, but coming close. And more importantly, changing extremes from high to low on a daily basis. This results from oscillations in the flow of the jet stream that are more meridional (N-S) than zonal (E-W). Changes of this kind have been anticipated by climate scientists for decades, and in fact are the main reason t

I became a geographer as an undergraduate, while Ronald Reagan was president. His lack of international experience and his commitment to simplistic views of geopolitics was worrisome, and also amusing. This poster went on my wall in those days, and I moved it from place to place for years. The original, tattered print is probably buried in my office somewhere; I was fortunate to find a clear version on Kelso's Corner , the blog of Washington Post cartographer Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso (the actual artist is named Horsey). Those who know me know that I could digress -- and I probably will in class next week -- about many parts of this map. But for now I will focus on just one corner of the map -- the outsized island labeled "Our China" -- better known as Taiwan or more archaically as Nationalist China. Of the two, Taiwan is by far the closer to the United States in terms of political outlook, but mainland China is far more important in economic terms, as a major supplier of ma

I always knew that the U.K. had a lot of pubs, but I did not realize it was quite this many. Go ahead, count them: To understand which parts of these islands are in the UK and which are not, I recommend a five-minute tutorial on the UK by CGP Gray Done counting? It is quite a few, is it not? Some but not all are mentioned in Bill Bryson's book Little Dribbling , which I have written about recently here and h ere . I expect to have maps of some of those pubs in the spring, when my geography seniors will be mapping some aspects of the book. The snapshot above was created for the benefit of those whose computers or phones might not support exploration of the actual map. It is included in an article that finds this pub map somewhat reassuring . One comment suggests -- humorously -- that the map reveals something about alcoholism in the UK. I am no expert on pubs, but the ubiquity depicted here reinforces my notion that pubs are at least as much about community as they are drink. The d