First it was New Orleans levees, now the I-35 West bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Two examples of the country’s deteriorating infrastructure. Today on NPR’s Day to Day, Thomas Rooney, a civil engineer based in St. Louis, talking with Alex Cohen about bridge safety, shocked me by saying that one bridge collapses every [...]

“Measure your impact on climate change” read the subject line of the e-mail sent to me by The Nature Conservancy on April 30th. It sat there in my inbox unopened until last week, because I dreaded thinking about my own contribution. It is so easy to be against global warming, but what sacrifices are you [...]

I have looked at the face of every service person killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. How? I watch PBS’s NewsHour every night and tape it when I am out. The NewsHour is the only TV news program that shows pictures of each of the service personnel killed in Iraq. I have learned to tell immediately [...]