A Voice from the Upper Midwest, by William Ostrem
My little corner of the world got shaken up last week when it was hit by severe storms. Last Thursday, August 24, was a strange day, as my town of Northfield, Minnesota, and neighboring areas experienced two periods of large hail and later a tornado watch. Our family was at home all day, and we experienced its surreal events together. Read the rest of this entry »
As we read news today of Saddam Hussein’s trial in Iraq, we learn more about atrocities that the Kurds suffered under his rule, including attacks using chemical weapons. That subject is addressed in the 2002 New Yorker article I referred to yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Great Terror.”
However, I’d like to highlight a different element of that article that feels more like dubious old history - its strong claims regarding the likelihood of Saddam Hussein obtaining nuclear weapons. I include it here as evidence of the kind of information, or pseudo-information, published in the mainstream media that influenced my early support of the war: Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been nearly two years since I started Northern Letter, and I’ve been largely silent about the Iraq War. That was partly due to my decision to avoid making politics a major subject of this blog and partly due to the fact that I didn’t feel I had a great deal to add to the debate.
Now I feel that continuing to be silent would be wrong. It would only provide continued tacit consent to the occupation of Iraq. Much could be said on the subject, but I will try to keep my comments brief. Read the rest of this entry »
My family and I are back from an enjoyable two-week trip to North Carolina and Washington, D.C. It involved some work as well as some vacation.
We spent the first week in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the second in the Outer Banks (along North Carolina’s coast), Virginia, and Washington. Raleigh, along with the cities of Chapel Hill and Durham, is in the “research triangle.” The name comes from the research universities in those cities: North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Duke University in Durham. Few metropolitan areas in the country have a comparable concentration of research universities - certainly none in the Upper Midwest - and this is sure to become an even more important area in the future. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll be on a bit of a summer break for a while, enjoying a slower summer pace. Hope you can do the same if you haven’t already.
I recently read “Imagine There’s No Oil: Scenes from a Liberal Apocalypse,” an article by Bryant Urstadt in the August 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine (not available online). I take the Peak Oil movement seriously, though I’m less alarmed about the future than its proponents are - perhaps as a result of my own denial. I recommend the article.
The article gave me pause about living in a cold-weather region. How will homes and workplaces be heated in a post-fossil fuel environment? Will we adapt and muddle through, or will there be an early catastrophic failure in the fuel supply? It would be best to think through the possibilites.
I’ve had a chance to read the Centers for Disease Control press briefing transcript that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. The briefing explains that the CDC study on chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), which used data from patients in Wichita, Kansas, resulted in 14 scientific articles published simultaneously in the journal Pharmacogenomics (April 2006 edition). It used new approaches in integrative biology and genomics and represents a new field called public health genomics. (CDC has actually created a new Office of Public Health Genomics.) It involved researchers from the fields of medicine, molecular biology, epidemiology, genomics, mathematics, engineering, and physics. The leaders of the research feel it can be used to study other complex diseases such as autism.
About twelve years ago I experienced a debilitating illness that lasted about nine months, the main feature of which was profound fatigue. One doctor diagnosed it as postviral fatigue, and I came to think of it as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). I also experienced depression and anxiety in conjunction with the illness. Read the rest of this entry »