Allan Dyen-Shapiro

I admit it—I like ridiculous titles.

The Internet has been atwitter (pun intended) with a hullaballoo that seems to me will be a tempest in a teapot to all but writers, editors, and publishers. However, much of the curated content on the Internet involves writers, edito...

By 2050, half of the world’s arable land will be salt-stressed due to rising sea levels. Although transgenic tomatoes that are more salt-tolerant have been around since the 1990s, even ignoring the political issues, the challenges surrounding making every variety of pl...

Yesterday’s Climate Change Town Hall uncovered rifts between the Democratic Presidential candidates. On the one extreme, Cory Booker pushed new nuclear power plants as essential to achieving decarbonization of the economy. Andrew Yang played apostle of the new carbon c...

            I was going to give up on this series after the first couple episodes of its last season. I had loved the first two seasons. The morally ambiguous superhero, the noir private eye, the woman suffering from Stockholm syndrome—none were innovative in and of th...

            For a long time, I felt that the role for men in the country’s debate over abortion was to shut up and not get involved. It was an issue for women and possibly their doctors.

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As this is a minefield, I will state my expertise from the get-go: at one point in my life, I published scientific papers quantifying the level of hormones. Plant hormones, rather than human ones, sure, but I feel qualified to comment on the science behind this case, a...

Up to recently, I had thought the most important role for educators, broadly defined, in this country was debunking climate change denial. Only in the US had it taken hold, and only the US, among the industrialized, mucho carbon-emitting countries of the world, had ele...

The US has become a pariah nation in terms of response to global climate change, but it is not because the average person is anti-environment. Recent surveys have indicated that an overwhelming majority of Americans and even a strong majority of politically conservativ...

Here’s a link to an excellent summary in the Washington Post of a very disturbing PNAS article. I’ve just a few clarifications to add.

Very brief summary first: previous studies of insect population decline were mostly done in Europe at temperate latitudes. Causes (as w...

I have been pretty consistent on calling bullshit on a particular left-wing rallying cry of Roundup as an environmental issue. The demonization of this herbicide started as a way of opposing Monsanto's quest to take over the world's food supply, a worthy endeavor that...