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High gasoline prices and war in the Middle East have handed the coal industry a golden moment, the likes of which it hasn’t seen in twenty-five years. As Jeff Goodell explains in his new book, Big Coal (review, page 67), the industry responded by reframing coal as the “clean,” homegrown answer to America’s anxious energy future. The reality is less tidy. We know this thanks to journalists like Goodell and the editors at Grist magazine (page 17), with their recent series on poverty and the environment: mountaintop-removal mining is destroying ecosystems, making people sick, and literally reshaping central Appalachia. The struggle to frame reality is at the center of our cover story, too, in which Daniel Schulman dissects the Bush administration’s aggressive global information war and the risks it poses for the credibility of both the military and the press. Robert S. Boynton pulls the covers off a different sort of reality — the decidedly unromantic, messy reality of writing — in his essay on Gay Talese’s curious new antimemoir, A Writer’s Life, and Jim Wooten takes us behind the lens of the TV camera to meet the gutsy men and women who bring history into our living rooms. Enjoy.
To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.
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