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In his unfortunately-titled 2009 book Idiot America , Boston sports writer Charles P. Pierce describes the growing aversion in his country -- and mine -- for public policies that are grounded in facts. I consider the title unfortunate because it is guaranteed to raise hackles more than it will invite readers, and in the process a very well-reasoned and researched book is not well known. Writing a few years before the web of deception strategies was condensed to just two words -- fake news -- Pierce identified three great premises of idiot America: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough I would use the term "incurious America" instead and might add a corollary: My opinion is as good as your expertise For it is the continued assault on the value of inquiry, research, and knowledge itself t

Note: This is an update on the ongoing crisis in Nicaragua. For detailed background, please see the #SOSNicaragua article that I posted on May 17 and continued to update until this week. A friend in Nicaragua shared this terrible map today. It shows the geographic depiction of the killings at protests between April 18 and July 25. This is a pace of state-sponsored killing equivalent to a Kent State massacre every day . In a country 1/50th the size of the United States, the impact of such repression is difficult to imagine.  Not since the Somoza regime has the Nicaraguan  government turned on a crowd  in this way, though we are aware of previous acts of repression by the Ortega regime in recent years. International condemnation has been widespread, including a bipartisan resolution by the U.S. House of Representatives. Perhaps anticipating that rebuke, Ortega sat for an interview with Fox News Monday night. Given the scant attention this story has gotten in the United States, the repo

The title of this post is redundant -- like "chili con carne with meat" -- but it is in fact how a U.S. visitor to Mexico City would need to get a quesadilla that would meet the key expectation of queso-ness. Reporting for PRI's The World , journalist Maya Kroth recently explored the culinary and linguistic story of the cheeseless quesadilla .

A recent hour of the NPR program On Point  explored the question shown below. I had the luxury -- I must have been in the car for a long ride -- of hearing the whole conversation as it aired last week. Fortunately, journalist extraordinaire Linda Wertheimer had nearly a full hour to mull various aspects of the question with some bright people who have given it a lot of thought. I recommend listening to the whole program -- including the calls from listeners -- for some important thoughts about a question I would frame in a slightly different way. As posed in the title, it seems that a binary answer is being sought. I would rather ask, "How can we maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of gentrification?" I would not have thought of it this way before hearing this program. One of the callers in particular caught my attention. The experience of Portland, Maine validates the finding mentioned earlier in the program, that gentrification is not limited to large cities. I had

The geography of climate change is complicated . With the entire state located far from the oceans and thousands of feet above sea-level, Colorado is safe from the rising water that is central to so many discussions of climate change and climate justice . This does not make Colorado -- or the rest of the western highlands of North America -- safe from climate change. As journalist Grace Hood recently reported on NPR, climate-related increases in fire hazard are causing many communities to make the difficult decision of canceling -- or greatly modifying -- traditional fireworks. In places where a carelessly discarded cigarette can ignite a blaze that burns thousands of square miles, fireworks are being reconsidered. Note: Grace Hood speaks with an  actual geography professor  as part of this story! Dr. Balch is an expert in -- among other things -- landscape ecology. Although I have not have the expertise in this area that she does, I was fortunate to take one graduate course in landsc

When I was asked to provide coffee for some of the morning class sessions of our university's visiting Mandela Fellows , I decided to provide a different coffee each day. Each coffee gives us a chance to explore something a bit different about the geography of coffee. Coffee is produced to some extent in almost every home country of this year's class of Mandela Fellows. Among these, the best known for coffee are Ethiopia and Uganda. South Africa is a bit of a surprise -- it is outside the Coffee Belt but produces a small amount of very good coffee. All of the coffees I am providing are fair-trade, organic coffees from Deans Beans in the town of Orange, Massachusetts -- about 100 miles northwest of our campus. The proprietor is Dean Cycon, a leader in authentic fair trade, and the author of Javatrekker , a book I use in all of the courses I teach about coffee. Every coffee his company sells is grown by cooperatives he has visited personally; most of them are described in his bo