The Gulf Disaster, in Perspective

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How big is the Gulf spill? Over at Beowulfe.com, you can use Google mapping technology to see what it would look like over your town.

Andy Revkin talked to the site creator, Andy Lintner, about what inspired him to develop it. “I realized that if more people understood the actual scale of the spill, they would be angry too,” said Lintner. “That anger is necessary to force the change we need to prevent this kind of thing happening again.”

I mapped it over my current home in Washington, D.C., but it stretches almost all the way up to my hometown in southern New Jersey. The thought of a giant pool of oil stretching from the Capitol dome all the way to my family’s farm is indeed shocking.

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LET’S TALK ABOUT OPTIMISM FOR A CHANGE

Democracy and journalism are in crisis mode—and have been for a while. So how about doing something different?

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