the browntable

Reduce, reuse, recycle. That’s the phrase. But what most of us forget is that it’s an ordered list. In fact, most of us do it in exactly the wrong order. We gobble up our plastic water bottles and toss them into the recycle bin and call it green. But why are we buying packaged water…

This Earth Day, supporters of political action on energy policy are trying to keep pace with the threat of devastating climate change. Back from recess, a handful of congressional committees are holding hearings as I type, about the scale of American response to the threat, and just what we’ll have to show for ourselves at…

Swing Batta! Obama and cricketer Brian Lara practice their stance in Trinidad and Tobago during Obama’s visit for the fifth Summit of the Americas. (Pete Souza/White House image) Covers the White House and Washington for The Root. Follow her on Twitter.

ESQUIRE’s Stephen Marche has written a hilarious piece detailing the end of the “douchebag” era: The departure of W., that backslapping, nickname-calling, know-nothing M.B.A. failure, is the cue for… the expense-account-abusing, bottle-service-ordering, Ayn Rand-quoting embarrassments of the American banking sector: Your relevance is dwindling, your presence no longer required. [W]e are seeing the return of…

Time for some pirating darts and laurels.  TIME gets out in front of mainstream American media (and catches up with the Brits) by reporting the full context of the purportedly sudden pirating menace. High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and…

2004 electoral flameout notwithstanding, Senator John Kerry deserves credit for picking himself up, dusting himself off, and throwing himself into international foreign political issues with the zeal of someone plotting a future run for president. Since losing to George W. Bush, the former soldier has tackled countless unglamorous but important issues that could otherwise be…

Listen up, America: Elections have consequences. The much-debated, much denounced series of so-called “torture memos” prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush have been released in edited form by the Obama administration. The document dump accompanies a statement by the president, avowing that torture methods undermine our moral authority and do…

Via a well-informed Trinidadian, today’s top billing at the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, on the occasion of President Barack Obama’s trip to Port of Spain for the 5th Summit of the Americas: “Michelle Obama Not Coming.” Having missed out on Barack’s goodwill op-ed, which ran in a rival paper today, the local Guardian—which, I’m told,…

Well, it’s April 15, and the returns are in—the presidential ones, that is. Barack and Michelle Obama and Joe and Jill Biden have filed their taxes and released, for public speculation, their accounting. The skinny: The Obamas made an adjusted gross income of $2,656,902 and paid $855,323 in federal income tax and $77,883 in state…

The Sentencing Project has crunched Bureau of Prisons numbers and found some relatively good news, finally: a significant drop in the number of blacks locked up for drug offenses. Between 1999 and 2005, the number of black drug offenders in state prisons plunged 21.6 percent, by about 30,000 people. In a countering, negative trend, white…