Culture Feature

For the Love of God, Stop Letting Elon Musk Near Public Transit!

Never let a weird train-hating billionaire design your city's mass transit.

Elon Musk Photo illustration

by Jonathan Raa_NurPhoto (Shutterstock)

Elon Musk gets a lot of credit for his contributions to technology.

It's on the basis of his supposed genius as a tech-mogul/inventor that people take him seriously when he talks about wild ideas like a Neuralink chip that "could solve paralysis, blindness, hearing," or the so-called Hyperloop, supersonic train system.

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Sir David Attenborough

By: ANDY RAIN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Recently David Attenborough — the soothing British narrator of every nature documentary ever who is also a devoted advocate for the nature he loves to speak so soothingly about — delivered an impassioned interview on 60 Minutes in which he described climate change as "a crime humanity has committed against the planet."

Attenborough is one of the world's most influential environmental advocates. In the interview, which follows the release of the Netflix documentary A Life on Our Planet and his memoir, Life on Air, Attenborough expressed his acute fears that all of his efforts have been for naught.

"It isn't that I enjoy saying: 'Doom, doom, doom,'" he said in the interview. "On the contrary, I'd much rather [say]: 'Enjoy, take thrill, excitement, pleasure, joy, joy, joy, joy.' But if you've got any sense of responsibility, you can't do that."

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Culture Feature

Everything You Need to Know About DarkSide, Colonial, and the Viral Gas Panic

The Colonial Pipeline is up and running again, but the madness isn't over...

From May 7th through the evening of May 12th, America's largest supply network for gasoline, diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel was shut down.

As of Thursday morning it is back online, though it will take a while for the typical rate of delivery to resume.

Under normal circumstances, the Colonial gas pipeline network is responsible for moving more than 100 million gallons of fuel every day, transporting it from refineries in Texas all the way up to New York, with offshoots all along the eastern seaboard. That's around 45% of the fuel supply for the east coast.

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Culture Feature

"Climate Town" Is a YouTube Channel Out to Save the World

Can one small YouTube channel heal the world? Probably not, but at least Climate Town is trying.

Rollie Williams is a lot of things: "dracula apologist," "guy who couldn't find a men's jumpsuit that fit him," "surprisingly big on billiards YouTube," and "happy just to be nominated."

But what he is, most of all, is a graduate student at Columbia University, studying Climate Science. And he's recently started putting his studies to good use, sharing his knowledge of the causes, consequences, and solutions to environmental degradation in an entertaining and informative series of videos on his YouTube channel, Climate Town.

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Culture Feature

Lucy Lawless Is the Warrior Princess We Need Right Now

The star of Xena: Warrior Princess has been schooling Kevin Sorbo's insanity on Twitter, and it's beautiful.

By: Mca Tv/Renaissance/Kobal/Shutterstock

Back in the '90s, coming home from school meant one thing — for cool kids, anyway — turning on the TV and enjoying two hours of steamy action-adventure nonsense with Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

But time has revealed that not all heroes are everything they're cracked up to be. Seeing Kevin Sorbo transform from the wise and kind hero of weekday adventures to a xenophobic demagogue pushing Christian-conservative propaganda, has been hard to watch. The feeling it leaves us with is one that only Sorbo himself can adequately express.

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Amanda Quaid

Photo by Li-An Lim on Unsplash

On the latest episode of Crossroads Cafe, I spoke with Amanda Quaid, a writer, actor, voice artist, and environmental activist whose work explores the joys and challenges of living in the modern world.

Our interview happened on November 7, the day Joe Biden was officially confirmed as the winner of the 2020 election. All around NYC there was a sense of buoyancy, and you might hear people screaming with glee in the background of the recording.

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