Salon.com > Michael Todd

America’s imaginary border insecurity

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

U.S. immigration reform has hinged on first “securing the border,” which has that sort of common sense appeal of not fixing water damage after a pipe bursts until you repair the leaky pipe.

Politicians from former presidential contenders to D.C. legislators to local sheriffs all insist that the border needs to be fixed before we can talk about legalizing existing illegal immigrants or making other changes to immigration policy. This week, Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the “gang of eight” working on drafting an immigration bill, repeated the mantra that there will be no bill without better border security. In Mexico last week, President Obama stressed the need to secure the border (which to Mexicans might involve preventing U.S. guns from heading south). NPR quoted Obama security adviser Ben Rhodes: “With Mexico, first and foremost, they are critical to our ability to secure the border. All the immigration plans that have been contemplated put a focus on securing the border as an essential priority and starting point for immigration reform.”

End of the dollar menu?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:18:00 +0000

“Value menus” increasingly seem a bad physical deal for consumers—and now perhaps a bum fiscal deal for fast-food purveyors. The cheap chow, long a target for nutrition-focused researchers and locavoring advocates, has been criticized for all manner of bad outcomes, mostly centered on obesity. Fast food in general is assailed by these same sources, of course—the book is Fast Food Nation, after all, and not Dollar Menu Dominion—but value menus (and their late cousin “supersize”) are seen as particularly egregious in making fat-laden crappy food—despite all the menu labeling, soda shrinking, portion bashing, and bad mouthing in the world— irresistibly cheap.

“Crowdfunding” brings science back to the masses

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

On the Good.is website right now is an appeal from Tyler Alterman, a matriculating neuroscientist and self-described scientific detective, seeking cash support for The Think Tank, his lab-on-wheels. This rolling experimentation station will travel the New York metro area to teach the masses about cognition and to draw them into studies about brain function.

Here’s “the plan,” as taken from Alterman’s appeal page at IndieGoGo:

A model, taken from the IndieGoGo appeal page, of what The Think Tank would look like. It was originally going to be dubbed the “Brainmobile.”

Is the metrosexual finally dead?

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:38:00 +0000

There was a death announced last week, and whether it was untimely or not, or even genuine, can remain a topic for the cyber garrulous.

The passing was of the metrosexual.

The word is that British journalist Mark Simpson coined “metrosexual” in 1994, that being the word because Mark “The ‘Daddy’ of the Metrosexual, the Retrosexual & Spawner of Sporno” Simpson tells us so. For a definition, I offer excerpts from the Urban Dictionary, with charming stylistic peculiarities intact:

A new name for something quite old. Men with taste & style who know about fashion, art, and culture have always existed. In past centuries, these kinds of men were in the uppercrust of society (more leisure time). … An American Metrosexual is like your average European male. In France or Italy, men can be manly and work on cars and know about art and fashion at the same time. They are cool with that and don’t need some special name for the less “masculine” side.