Interview: Mushroom Master Paul Stamets Launches Life Box
The mushroom world couldn’t have a better friend than Paul Stamets – and I assure you the feeling is mutual. Stamets has been growing and studying fungi for about three decades. His family-run company, Fungi Perfecti, is the country’s leading Certified Organic source for gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. But Stamets believes that fungi is more…
US Health Costs Rise As Life Expectancy Drops
“Hey,” you may be asking yourself. “Where’s the United States on this National Geographic graph comparing health care spending per person and average life expectancy at birth?” See way up there in the upper left corner? That’s the US, spending $7,290 per person, each of whom lives about 78 years – less than just about…
Augmented Reality In Hell’s Kitchen
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo. Although it would drive us insane to be completely conscious of it, our daily lives are saturated with countless advertisements and brand interactions. It’s a corporate world, as a majority of the Supreme Court reminded us recently when it decided that corporations have the same rights…
Interview: Oxfam’s Liz Lucas In Haiti
Providing water and preventing diarrhea is Oxfam’s main mission in Haiti right now, says Liz Lucas, the relief organization’s American press officer. And HeadCount is donating all money collected at shows through March 1 to Oxfam America’s relief effort in Haiti. (Learn more about how you can donate here.) Emergency-response organizations from around the world…
Poor You: Economist Samuel Bowles Has Some Bad News
A Santa Fe economist has some sobering facts and figures for you. It turns out that New Mexico is losing jobs more than a hundred times faster than the state’s Economic Development Department is creating them – and you could probably extrapolate those grim numbers to many other states. According to this must-read story in…
Obama Budget Escalates War On (Some) Drugs, Slightly
According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), President Obama’s 2011 National Drug Control Budget is requesting $15.5 billion “to reduce drug use and its consequences.” This represents an increase of $521.1 million, or 3.5%, over 2010. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition notes that the upcoming budget allocates in money in almost exactly the…
Voto Latino Exchanges Ozomatli, Pitbull Tracks For Census Pledge
This seems more than fair: If you’re a Latino citizen (and even if you’re not), HeadCount partner Voto Latino would like to share twenty-five free tracks with you in exchange for pledging to participate in the 2010 census. The Latino community has been traditionally undercounted in past censuses, which means political underrepresentation and underfunding of…
Move Your Money (If You Have Any)
Arianna Huffington thinks we should move our money out of the six banks that hold 60% of our gross domestic product – Bank of America, J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, U.S. BC – and into small local banks or credit unions. Assuming you have any to move. Huffington’s Move Your Money movement…
Obama Meets Republicans, Wins Back Jon Stewart
If you haven’t yet watched President Obama’s lively and engaging Q&A during a GOP retreat last Friday, what are you waiting for? (Or you could just catch the high points, with an obviously delighted Jon Stewart, below.) Yes, political points aplenty were scored. But more importantly, Obama was modeling a type of civil discourse that,…
Conversation: Phish Chroniclers Richard Gehr And Parke Puterbaugh
Parke Puterbaugh and I have at least a couple of things in common. We’ve both covered music for some of the same magazines, and we’ve both written books either with or for or at least tolerated by Phish. The Phish Book, published in 1998 and, ahem, currently out of print, was a collaboration with the…