Tuesday evening roundup

Here's a reason to fear for the future of newspapers. I understand human-interest-story overload, but still. Meanwhile, Anne Applebaum, writing for the Post, criticizes criticizes corporate censorship.

Punditry gone very wrong.

Scholars opine on what, exactly, constitutes socialism these days. Meanwhile, mock Che t-shirts are becoming as much a cliche as the real thing. Even I have to say, "enough already."

In case any doubts remained about the inanity of incentives in our current health care system.

Nor is airport security without inanity:

"Lots of people have complaints about airport security, but when I hear them from pilots, as I frequently do, I really have to wonder what goes through the heads of some screeners. A few years ago, I spoke with an airline pilot who was dumbfounded when a screener pawed over every object in his carry-on bag. The pilot asked the screener why. “We can’t let you have something that would let you take over the plane,” he said he was told."

Tom Philpott on why Borlaug left a mixed legacy:

For him, the complexities of poverty and hunger could be reduced to a single problem: not enough food. From there, the answer was simple: grow as much as possible, using whatever technology available...

But it may be that Borlaug’s blindness to politics—his refusal to consider the power relations at work in the countries whose hungry he set out to save—undermined his legacy. His tireless effort to boost grain yields, while no doubt resulting in a flood of cheap grain, created all manner of problems that won’t be easily solved...

In Borlaug’s Green Revolution paradigm, farmers are urged to specialize in one or two commodity crops—say, corn or wheat. To grow them, they were to buy hybridized seeds and ample doses of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. (Borlaug’s celebrated “dwarf” varieties can thrive only with plenty of water and lots of synthetic nitrogen, and face serious pest pressure, requiring heavy pesticide doses.) The award for buying into the “Green Revolution package” was a bumper crop. The problem was that when everyone did the same thing and yields spiked, the price farmers received for their crops plunged...

The result is a kind of vicious cycle: farmers scramble to produce more to offset losses, leading to yet more downward pressure on prices. Of course, there’s the temptation to boost yields with yet more inputs like fertilizer—meaning that farmers’ costs could continue creeping up even as the prices they received in the marketplace fell steadily. The result is a kind of structural economic crisis in farming...

For me, the point isn’t that Borlaug is a villain and that crop yields don’t matter; rather, it’s that boosting yield alone can’t solve hunger problems in any but the most fleeting way. Farmers’ economic well-being; biodiversity; ecology; local knowledge, buy-in, and food traditions—all of these things matter, too.

Perhaps the Times' best op-art ever.