If the debate over climate change is closed, why is John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, still trying to prove it’s all a scam?

Well over a quarter-million weathercasts—that’s the ballpark figure the 74-year-old founding father of the Weather Channel guesses he’s probably performed in his 55 years in the business. Today, as for the past 15 years, he’s chalked up another weathercast like it’s his job, because it is. This, he tells me, is…

Beijing should bankroll a new “global rescue fund” to help countries hit hardest by the economic collapse.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, most countries are looking to the United States to stabilize markets and prevent a second Great Depression. “Americans don’t have a choice, they must absolutely have a global plan,” the head of France’s central bank told reporters. But rather than asking Washington to save the day, the world should choose a wiser…

A primer on the best burgeoning bike scenes in North America

In any list of the best biking cities on the continent, Portland, Oregon, would certainly come out on top (with some cries of foul from San Francisco cyclists). But there are plenty of other North American cities where people move on pedal power. And in the wake of the 2008 spike in gas prices and boom in bike sales, municipal governments are attempting to make…

We purchase refrigerators the way we fill them: out of necessity—to preserve the milk; to keep the greens from wilting. But from the right vantage point, an open fridge is the perfect staging grounds for a discussion of consumption. And if the aphorism holds true—if we really are what we eat—then refrigerators are like windows into our souls. It’s that sentiment that’s at the heart of Mark Menjivar’s inventive exploration of hunger, “You Are What You…

For decades, states have defined themselves through their charming roadside rest stops. Now, they’re losing ground to supersized highway chains. GOOD visits a few of them to figure out what went wrong.

Megan Svajda, a lobbyist for the Virginia Hospitality and Travel Association, is sitting in a smart pantsuit and heels at a shaded picnic table off mile marker 107 on Interstate 95, just north of Richmond. Carloads of vacationing families funnel in and out…

No one seems to want to admit when American water isn’t safe to drink. Instead, they try to hide it.

For years, U.S. health officials have claimed that although the drinking water at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune is contaminated, it poses no danger to Marines or their families. This April, the government reversed itself, saying that its assessment of the water contained “omissions” and “inaccuracies,” and adding that a million people over the course of three…

Will recycling urine into drinking water solve the problem of water scarcity?

On May 20, three astronauts held up silver pouches to toast a new beverage available onboard the International Space Station. The containers looked like Capri Sun, but they weren’t filled with juice drink. It was water recycled from their urine.

The new $154-million water recycling system—which creates a day’s worth of water from urine, sweat, and exhaled air—will reduce the $12 million per year NASA hemorrhages…

Can “casual carpool”—the Bay Area’s grassroots solution to traffic—go global?

Every weekday, between 6:00 and 9:30 in the morning, a stream of cars and a line of pedestrian commuters converge at a Safeway supermarket in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, California. Without a single raised thumb, the individual passengers fill the empty seats in the waiting vehicles. Once a car has three people, it jumps onto the nearby Highway 24, bound for the Bay Bridge. Thirty…

Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. explores the gargantuan machine behind our nation’s food industry.

The generally abysmal food that ends up in our restaurants and supermarkets is the cause of widespread obesity and diabetes, and is produced by a few giant corporations operating in plain sight of the FDA and USDA. To whit, in the grand tradition of such films and books as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and, to some extent, Upton…

California’s classroom conditions are among the worst in the nation, according to studies by the Air Resources Board and the Department of Health Services. Some 85,000 trailers—euphemistically dubbed “learning cottages” by manufacturers—pepper the state’s poorest districts. Cheaply built and designed to be towed down the highway, the trailers were originally intended to provide a temporary solution for student overflow. However, they’ve become a permanent problem, as 2 million students now attend classes in them every day.…

Chris Cosentino is using historical recipes to turn offal—the entrails and organs we usually discard—into a new American delicacy.

If you were cooking 2,000 years ago, you would have to use local, organic, and seasonal ingredients. And, because meat was hard to come by, you would use the entire animal, including the offal (literally “off-fall”)—the entrails and internal organs of your slaughter.

At San Francisco’s Incanto restaurant, chef Chris Cosentino is reviving old recipes that incorporate offal and other…

Change your underwear—change the world. That’s the idea behind PACT, an apparel company tailored for people who want something more sustainable in their shorts. Launched in 2009, PACT sells premium men’s and women’s underwear online—but their mission goes beyond your boxers. PACT Donates 10 percent of its sales to nonprofit organizations, sources its material from a sustainable supply chain, and uses its underwear as a blank canvas for artists and designers.

PACT’s founders, Jeff Denby and…