Very few of the heroes and villains made famous in the wars of the past decade are women. Of the scant exceptions, two of the most fascinating are the subjects of Deborah Scroggins’s thoughtful double biography, “Wanted Women.” One is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born thinker and neoconservative darling; the other is Aafia Siddiqui, a [...]
Eliza Griswold featured in a short film entitled Post Cards from Karachi by Ram Devineni.
Eliza Griswold featured in the most recent issue of The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Magazine. Listen to Podcast here. Everyone Is an Immigrant Poetry and reportage in Lampedusa. Two paramedics, a man and a woman wearing green and blue scrubs, toss biscotti to seagulls. They glance out at the open ocean. Behind them, at the [...]
For the past several years, as Pennsylvanians have increasingly cried foul over the disposal of fracking wastewater in local treatment plants, gas companies have shipped the millions of gallons of water used in the fracking process to nearby Ohio. Unlike Pa, Ohio’s geology allows for deep water injection wells, which are pockets deep in the [...]
Here’s a new study that argues that the myth of industry’s innovative success in terms of natural gas drilling was born out of research made possible by the federal government. According to its authors, the study finds that George P. Mitchell relied on the research and methods pioneered by federal engineers and not the other [...]
Due to the low cost of conventional gas in general and shale gas in particular, a Brazilian company has found that it’s cheaper to build and operate in Texas than in Mexico, where electricity is 30% more expensive. The next leg of the boom in the natural gas industry is just that–industry. West Virginia and [...]
Here’s a cheery carol that protestors sang yesterday outside the U.S. Steel Building in Pittsburgh. “Arrest ye merry bankermen all profiting today you crashed the whole economy yet nothing did you pay You threw us under unfair rule when you did go astray In-dict-ments our comfort and joy comfort and joy” The crowd [...]
The gas boom in Pennsylvania has had a positive impact on the growth of several industries, including pharmaceuticals, which rely on natural gas, and old school regional players, like U.S. Steel, which is building the pipes to use as gas pipeline. In the midst of the highly polarized debates about fracking, more attention needs to [...]
Right now, Pennsylvania drillers pay no tax for taking gas out of the ground. Next year, they might pay a flat fee of $160,000, which breaks down, on average, to about 1% of what a company stands to make from a well. It’s less than any other state, and as many Pennsylvania’s put it, “Texas [...]
The only difference between America’s water and Africa’s is chlorine, Pittsburgh-based civil engineer Greg Scott told me last fall. What keeps Americans healthy isn’t necessarily the quality of the nation’s water. The difference between first world and third largely lies in a nation’s ability to treat its water. That’s one reason why failing infrastructure is [...]