alias Bruce.

The best show on the radio, bar none.

The weekly program This American Life, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, consistently delivers important public-interest investigative stories, poignant personal drama, and imaginative and occasionally outrageous humor. Its success has spawned a slew of copycat "story"-formatted radio shows. But accept no substitutes. None even come close to the impact of the original.

One reason for this is that TAL has real journalistic conviction: when its reporters and producers tackle an investigative story, they are not afraid to take a stand on the meaning of what their uncovered evidence reveals. (Contrast this with the cardboard "he said-she said" barrier behind which most major-media reporters hide on explosive stories.)

Another reason is that even when TAL does "softer" human-interest stories it does them so damned humanly and creatively. Where else would you hear, for instance, the high school kids in a tiny town tell the story of what happens when a huge tornado strikes their burg smack in the middle of prom night?

But here is my best current argument for why you need to listen to This American Life: its July 24 "When Patents Attack!" episode, which tells the fascinating and horrifying story of how a school of sharks known as "patent trolls" has turned the U.S. patent system into a force that scares off innovators instead of protecting and encouraging them. Trust me: there is nothing nerdy about this story. And its implications will blow you away.

Listen to that episode, free, here.

So here's the problem with earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and violent storms and forest fires

and the entire weird plethora of extreme environmental events we are painfully beginning to get used to:

We have a whole cast of players with colossal vested interests in a way of life that creates climate change: oil companies, coal companies, natural gas companies, timber companies, real estate developers, car and truck manufacturers and dealers, agribusiness, food processors and distributors, fast food conglomerates (who depend on agribusiness), highway builders, airlines, furniture manufacturers, factories of all kinds. And that's just a sampling.

But at the same time, we citizens have a growing shared certainty -- like the knowledge in the pit of the stomach of a married person who knows they are going to have to ask for a divorce -- that the increasingly wild earthly events through which we are living are not accidents, but a looming warning. A hammer over our heads. Most us feel it. With every new report of a "freak storm" or "monster fire" or "surprising string" of events, we feel it.

We know, more and more, that our way of life won't work. And we know that the planet is trying to shrug it off, and that if we don't change it, and change it fast, she will shrug us off with it.

But our moneychangers and their Capitol Hill employees don't want to hear what we know. We need pipelines, they tell us. We need more roads. We need timber, we need oil, we need mass-production grain-based agriculture, we need cheap patio furniture from South America and Asia. We need to do what we're doing. For just a while longer.

And meanwhile Hurricane Irene crashes into New York and an earthquake hits the East Coast and tornadoes spring up like killer weeds and scientists agree that we are in big trouble. And every morning when you and I walk out into the world we feel as if we are taking another step off a cliff.

Because we are.

A new study finds that even mundane disorder spurs discrimination.

The study, by Dutch researchers Diederik A. Stapel and Siegwart Lindenberg, appeared in the April 8 issue of the journal Science. It found, in field and laboratory experiments, that people were more prone to stereotype and discriminate against others in what the two scientists called "disordered contexts" – a train station littered with garbage, a broken-up sidewalk, a graffiti-filled space – than they were in more orderly settings. In one train station experiment, whites surveyed were much likelier to express hostile stereotypes of Muslims and gays when the station was dirty and littered (due to a railroad cleaning workers' strike) than when it was clean and tidy. White passengers were also less prone to sit close to a black person during the strike.

The reason? According to Stapel and Lindenberg's article, people feel "a heightened need for structure" in such disordered situations, and so we fall back on simple constructs to appease ourselves. Even if the disorder is no more than litter or badly cracked concrete.

That explanation makes sense to me. Bigotry has for centuries proven itself to be a fabulous outlet for anxiety about one's lack of control. An unemployed white guy sneering "nigger" at a bus driver; an angry black resident attacking "the gay agenda" as she watches families disintegrate in her impoverished neighborhood; a man clinging to two low-wage jobs while he rails against illegal immigrants – these are all amplified versions of Stapel and Lindenberg's train-station dynamic. And they work like gangbusters to redirect anxieties toward designated bogeymen and away from the actual causes of the problems. As I have said before, bigotry began working as an American wedge issue the day the first dirt-poor white was sent into the swamp to chase down the first escaped black slave.

Stapel and Lindenberg's conclusion about what their research means for public policy: "Diagnose environmental disorder early and intervene immediately." I'll buy that – if by "environmental disorder" we mean greed-driven economic policy and the political tactics of dog-eat-dog race-baiting.

A nod to PRI's The World, which aired a story on Stapel and Lindenberg's study.

Dig this from the NYT about the fight over the California state rock:

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July 13, 2010 - Geologists...are enraged over a bill in Sacramento that would knock serpentine, the official state rock, off its mantel.

State Senator Gloria Romero proposed the serpentine bill. The lawmaker and others who would like to see serpentine stripped of its title say the olive green rock found all over the state is a grim symbol of the deadly cancers associated with asbestos, which can be found in the rock. Geologists, who have taken to Twitter on behalf of the rock, assert that serpentine is harmless and is being demonized by advocates for people with asbestos-related diseases and possibly their trial lawyers, too.

Declaring that serpentine "has known health effects," the bill would leave California — one of roughly half the states in the nation with an official rock or mineral — without an official rock.

"There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock," said Malcolm Ross, a geologist who retired from the United States Geological Survey in 1995. "Unless they were breaking it up with a sledgehammer year after year."

Dr. Ross and other opponents of the bill are concerned that removing serpentine, which is occasionally used in jewelry, as the state’s rock would demonize it and thus inspire litigation against museums, property owners and other sites where the rocks sit; they cite the inclusion of a letter of support from the Consumer Attorneys of California with the bill as evidence.

“If they keep the asbestos issue bubbling," Dr. Ross said, "it means money for politicians, more money for lawyers and money for scientists to investigate.”
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Entire story here. It's true what fiction writers say: the best material is stuff that really happens.