I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love love love Smithsonian Magazine. I read the July issue cover-to-cover this evening. Here are some highlights:
From Michael Pollan:
What's eating America: Corn is one of the plant kingdom's biggest successes. That's not necessarily good for the United States.
Check it, yo:
There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them contain corn. At the same time, the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the 45,000 different items or SKUs (stock keeping units) represent genuine variety rather than the clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.From Jerry Adler:
Finding a Home in the Cosmos: In a new book written with his wife, Nancy Abrams, cosmologist Joel Primack argues that the universe, far from being a meaningless void, was meant for us. Sort of.
What? You don't want to read this? Here's a delicious tease:
Primack was a particle physicist who became interested in cosmology in the late 1970s, coinciding with the field's transformation by inflation theory and supersymmetry. The former is the idea that for a tiny fraction of a second at the beginning of the Big Bang the universe expanded faster than the speed of light, creating random energy fluctuations that eventually became the large-scale structures of galaxies, galaxy clusters and superclusters. The latter is a theory that relates the properties of particles of force and matter, giving rise to predictions about invisible, or "dark," matter. Primack has lived through, and participated in, what he considers one of the great achievements of human intellect: the unification of experiment, observation and theory in a mathematically consistent account of the 14-billion-year history of the universe. "There are still a lot of unsolved problems, but all the data fits together," Primack says. "We cosmologists have been congratulating ourselves that we finally got the story right. But that's something that the public doesn't appreciate."
From Arthur Lubow
Grand Reopening: Speaking of Art - Two museums return home and invite visitors to engage in "conversations."
Umm, anyone want to meet in D.C.?
3 comments:
I've got a gold opportunity, right here in my pants.
As for the Smithsonian, I can't imagine a better way to spend a weekend than trolling around the museums with you, Madge. Be forwarned, though - I tend to get all drooly and ga-ga at the Air & Space Museum.
I love that mag! I had to stop renewing magazine subscriptions last fall due to my budget, and I miss the Smithsonian (and the National Geographic) the most.
I will read the Smithsonian if you pick up The Sun. Okay?
Deal?
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