Okay, I'll admit it, I spent the inaugural weekend in denial. (He's not my president. Most of us didn't actually vote for the guy ... ) Ignored the smarmy front-page photos of parades and balls, skipped straight to Section B to look for coverage of the protests. But the fact is, we now have a new administration that's hostile to the things I love most: human kindness, the dignity of diversity, and the wild glory of life on earth. It's time to move on from denial to the next stage, which would be bitter cynicism or action.

I'm opting for action, because I don't really have a choice. Looking out my window right now I can see my two girls outside under the mesquite trees in this precious riparian woodland where we live, and my heart starts to break for all the beautiful things they'll never see if I allow unchecked Bushwhacking in the next four years. Civil rights and reproductive choice I suppose we could win back in time (though not the lives lost along the way), but the waters and wild lands devastated will never come back. So I've taken a vow to spend at least some part of every week protecting the truths and places I treasure.

TRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT is an investigation of the history of the chemical revolution and the companies that drove it – and how companies worked to withhold vital information about the risks from workers, the government, and the public. Journalist Bill Moyers and producer Sherry Jones rely on an archive of documents the public was never meant to see –- documents that reveal the industry's early knowledge that some chemicals could pose dangers to human health that were not disclosed at the time.

But the documentary also reports a much larger story – a never- before-told account of a campaign to limit the regulation of toxic chemicals and any liability for their effects.

Today, every man, woman and child has synthetic chemicals in their bodies. No child is born free of them. Are they safe? Does anyone know? What is the industry doing to keep us fully informed about the health and safety effects of chemicals? These are the crucial questions raised by the documentary and addressed in a panel discussion moderated by Bill Moyers in the program's final half hour.

Anyone who persists in the belief that television, video games, computer images, and the cinema do not profoundly influence children is just willfully blind. The qualities of the images we bathe in are at the same time qualities of our inner life -- that's what it means for us to experience them. The only question is how we work with and assimilate these qualities. And our answer to this question helps to determine the qualities of the objective world we share with each other.

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It may be that the decisive challenge facing children today is to find some kind of stable, grounding coherence within the various sorts of reality assaulting them. The current prognosis for these kids is not encouraging, and can be summed up in a simple question: if we are stumbling around in a confused dialectic between appearance and reality, should we wonder that our children are doing the same?

The action began Monday, March 19th, when a coronal mass ejection from the Sun hit Earth's magnetosphere. Modest geomagnetic disturbances began soon after the impact and then intensified when the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) near Earth turned south. South-pointing IMFs create a weak spot in Earth's protective magnetosphere that can allow solar wind gusts to penetrate. The strong G3-category storm raged for more than 24 hours.

Three days later on Thursday, March 22nd, a weak interplanetary shock wave --the leading edge of a coronal mass ejection that left the Sun on March 19th-- buffeted Earth's magnetosphere. The impact sparked a period of high-latitude auroras that dazzled Alaskans and other northerners.

We all know that exposure to bad things in the environment can make you sick, but could good things in the environment actually make your healthier?

Maybe so. An article in this month's American Journal of Preventive Medicine reviews several studies that suggest even looking at nature can boost people's health.

The Central Intelligence Agency had a secret weapon at the Bay of Pigs, the ability to plant propaganda directly on international news wire services, according to a newly declassified C.I.A. document.

The document, a "propaganda plan" issued shortly before the invasion in April 1961, said the agency's headquarters had "the capability of placing items directly on the wire service tickers" as part of its "regular propaganda apparatus."

It has been known since the 1970's that in the cold war the C.I.A. had a handful of "assets," or agents, in place at some news organizations like The Associated Press and United Press International, particularly in foreign bureaus. The newly declassified document says flatly that the intelligence agency could essentially dictate articles and have them sent around the world.

"The universe," the poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, "is made of stories, not atoms." This being the science section, you might be tempted to regard that statement as a predictable humanistic rant against cold scientific reality. For the last 300 years, after all, the story that physicists have been telling us is that the shifting shape of the world is made exactly of atoms, irreducible and indestructible nuggets of existence, bouncing around according to Newton's and a few other simple laws.

The job of the physicist was simply to elucidate the identity and properties of the elementary particles engaged in this dance. Democritus, who invented the idea of atoms, endowed them simply with mass, shape and motion; today's elementary particles — quarks and electrons — have mass, charge, spin, strangeness and charm, among other properties, but the basic picture remains the same.

Or does it? Nowadays physicists — those coldblooded reductionists — are telling a more poetic but no less mathematically rigorous tale. It is a story not of a clockwork world but an entangled interactive world whose constituents derive their identities and properties from one another in endless negotiation — a city, in one physicist's words, of querulous social inhabitants. In other words, they are telling a tale about relationships.

Democracy tends to do well under market systems because free economies leave large amounts of power (and money) out of the hands of government. People opposed to any given government can usually find the resources to make their case and have a chance of winning the next election. But when the government owns everything, as the libertarian economist F. A. Hayek put it memorably, it owns "the means to all our ends."

Yet democracy is a system of "one person, one vote," not "one dollar, one vote." The big concentrations of economic power that market economies make possible can have undue influence on governments -- even democratic governments. A capitalist democracy ceases to be capitalist when the government takes over the economy. But it ceases to be democratic when the power of monied interests dominates the government.

Last week, Ian Thomas posted a map on a U.S. government Web site of the caribou calving areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area the Bush administration wants to open up for oil exploration.

This week, Thomas is looking for a new job.

"I'm really flabbergasted," Thomas said Wednesday. "After putting out 20,000 maps with no problem and then putting out one where baby caribou like to hang out, I got fired."

Thomas, a contract employee for the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, says he is a victim of politics. His offense: drawing attention to wildlife that might be affected by drilling.

In 1993, during what I can now thankfully call the nadir of my personal and professional life, I discovered the internet, and essentially disappeared into it. For someone who had spent a lot of time thinking about language and community, the net was like a gift, having something this interesting to think about. At a time when I was living an otherwise flattened existence, the daily challenge of trying to understand the net gave me something to live for.

None of my friends at the time was online, so I made a second set of friends, mainly on panix, ECHO, and alt.folklore.urban. During those years, I essentially lived in two worlds, with the networked world seeming realer to me than the real world. I often had a daydream in which the hum of the internet just grazed the top of my skull; it felt as if by standing on tip-toe I should be able to press my brain directly into the network. Going 24 hours without jacking in made me physically ill.

Therefore, when I face questions like "Does the web as we know it enhance our ability to communicate, or does it further isolate us?", I have to ask, why pick? It seems to do both, or at least it did for me.

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I think the internet is driving the increasing importance of "immaterial culture" that will mostly operate alongside but in some cases displace the material culture we are used to.

Material culture is the present tense version of physical anthropology, where the question "How do we live?" is answered by examining the material facts of our lives: our clothes, food, houses, dwellings, decorations, and so on.

As the internet permeates society, examination of material culture is increasingly inadequate to answer those questions.

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So culture is increasingly vested in the immaterial choices we make about our lives -- when everyone has access to the network, what you *do* with that access becomes a more powerful act of self-definition than the choices you make about your material culture and your immediate surroundings.

Does radio seem bad these days? Do all the hits sound the same, all the stars seem like cookie cutouts of one another?

It's because they do, and they are.

Why? Listeners may not realize it, but radio today is largely bought by the record companies. Most rock and Top 40 stations get paid to play the songs they spin by the companies that manufacture the records.

Here's how the president of the United States was elected: In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered local elections supervisors to purge 64,000 voters from voter lists on the grounds that they were felons who were not entitled to vote in Florida. As it turns out, these voters weren't felons, or at least, only a very few were. However, the voters on this "scrub list" were, notably, African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic Democrats.

Beginning in November, this extraordinary news ran, as it should, on Page 1 of the country's leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the United States, it ran on page zero — that is, the story was not covered on the news pages. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also was given big television network coverage. But again, it was on the wrong continent: on BBC television, London.

Anyway--there has been one universal struggle going on--the power of man and his mind and his own, individual superb abilities to manage himself and his own affairs . . . against the tyranny of those who wish to control others solely for the purpose of furthering their own material advantage. This is the fight, traditionally, of the underdog vs. the giant. Of Robin Hood vs. the crooked rich. Of Socrates spreading the world and paying with his death. Of David vs. Goliath. As the women vs. the men who would suffer (suffrage?) them, as the blacks who were whipped and chained vs. their white American masters, as the powderkeg of the massive young getting together to just say no to 25,000 American kids killed for no good reason, not to mention all the Vietnamese and their neighborhood, too . . . and now, there is the greatest battle of all: the people of the world vs. the corporations and tyrannies who control it. It's about globalism all right--about the globalism of the world by the people who live in it, rather than those who would exploit it.

Scientists think they have identified the part of the brain, which if switched off, can stimulate artistic genius, a BBC documentary shows.

The discovery was made after studying people with autism and dementia, but an Australian scientist believes ordinary people may one day be able to "tap in" and allow them at least a moment of genius.

‘Now’ is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. Huge industries feel pressure to plan for the bottom line and the next shareholders’ meeting. Politicians feel forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. The media attract bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated reactions to ‘human interest’ stories while overlooking longer-term issues – the real human interest.

"Of all the activities we quantified - passive, intellectual and physical - Alzheimer's patients are in middle life less active in all of them - except for one, which is television." He accepts that it is possible for television to be intellectually stimulating "but probably that is not what is happening most of the time, especially in America, where people watch an average of four hours a day.

"I think it is bad for the brain to watch four hours of television a day." The brain has been honed by evolutionary forces to be active, and learning is an important part of life. "When you watch TV you can be in a semi-conscious state where you really are not doing any learning."

For me it is a central paradox of the twentieth century that despite our powerful intellectual skills and our ingenious engineering and medical achievements, we still lack the ability to live wisely. My perspective on this paradox draws from my experience growing up as a child in a village in the Indian state of Kerela.