One day after his shift at the steel mill, Gary Myers drove home in his 10-year-old Pontiac and told his wife he was going to run for Congress.

The odds were long. At 34, Myers was the shift foreman at the ‘hot mill’ of the Armco plant in Butler, Pa. He had no political experience, little or no money, and he was a Republican in a district that tilted Democrat.

But standing in the dining room, still in his work clothes, he said he felt voters deserved a better choice.

Three years later, he won.

Back when Myers entered Congress in 1975, it wasn’t nearly so unusual for a person with few assets besides a home to win and serve in Congress.

But the financial gap between Americans and their representatives in Congress has widened considerably since then, according to an analysis of financial disclosures by The Washington Post.

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House has risen 21/2 times, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, rising from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the median sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel […]

No Comments

In its 2008 heyday, the blog Stuff White People Like took aim at the ubiquity of ‘outdoor performance clothes’-people’s penchant for marching down city streets and suburban strip malls dressed as if they were slogging the Appalachian Trail.

It turns out, our devotion to outdoor wear might be more than just a crime against fashion. It might also be a crime against the outdoors itself-or at least, that vast swath of it that’s covered by ocean.

Over on Grist, Clare Leschin-Hoar brings the bad news. She points to a recent study showing that ‘nearly 2,000 polyester fibers can shake loose from a single piece of clothing in the wash and, unfortunately, those tiny plastic bits are making their way into the ocean.’

Just how prevalent are they? In a recent Science study, researchers took sand from 18 beaches over six continents, Clare Leschin-Hoar reports. The results?

Every beach tested contained microplastics (particles about the size of a piece of long grain of rice or smaller). Of the samples collected, nearly 80 percent were polyester or acrylic, though without further research, it’s impossible to know exactly which type of clothing-whether it’s your stretchy yoga pants or that super-soft fleece blanket-is causing […]

No Comments

Occupy Wall Street has us all thinking about the bad things companies can do – and rightly so, because often those things are very, very bad. (The 2008 financial meltdown, anyone? How about the ongoing foreclosure crisis?) But sometimes some companies take steps in a positive direction, and it’s worth giving those efforts a look as well.

First, let me make one thing clear: a company’s inclusion on this list does not mean it is outstanding in every facet of its business. Quite the contrary. But each of these companies has done at least some things this year that are worthy of praise.

It’s also worth acknowledging that there are scores of companies that launched socially responsible initiatives in 2011, and many of them were surely commendable. But the purpose of this article isn’t to pat companies on the back for giving back to the world; really, every company should be doing that, at the bare minimum. Below you’ll find only companies that engaged this year in efforts that are changing – or at least have the potential to change – corporate America for the better. That’s a slippery metric, no doubt, but it offers a good starting point for examining corporate […]

No Comments

On Sunday morning, Dec. 18, I received a mass email from President Obama, informing me that the last of our troops had left Iraq.

The war is over.

To me, the final figures, reported in The Times, are staggeringly unreal: Nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers died. An estimated 104,000 to 113,000 Iraqi civilians died. The U.S. spent in excess of $832 billion on a war that lasted more than 3,000 days. Approximately 150 journalists died covering the conflict.

Amid the retrospectives and requiems marking the war’s end, I’ve tried to find meaning from my experience in it. Many political pundits say it was all a big mistake and a terrible waste. I try to push these thoughts aside. It has to mean something, at least to all those touched by the war.

Almost daily, images from the war cross my mind, like an endless loop of film.

I remember a woman wailing in grief over her mortally wounded grandson in the streets of Baghdad. The 8-year-old was tagging along behind a squad of American soldiers who came under attack. He was struck by grenade shrapnel and died at the hospital. I wonder if nine years has dulled that grandmother’s anguish. I think about the soldiers I […]

No Comments

The results of studies that try to quantify the effects of climate change on biodiversity loss - which include damage to the micro scale level of subspecies and genetic variation - are perhaps most shocking.

When, however, you focus on the response to climate change at the macro level, the ecosystem level, you get a better understanding of what is one of the major drivers of that biodiversity loss: forced migrations. And even here, the numbers may be larger than one would expect, as a new assessment by NASA and Caltech published in the journal Climatic Change shows that by 2100 some 40 percent of ‘major ecological community types

No Comments