The humble stars of curling

TOP: Dan Brown warms up before playing against the Olympic curlers at the Eau Claire Curling Club. BOTTOM: au Claire, Wis. — Laurie Marsh, left, and Lynita Delaney, right, sweep for Ava Roessler, 3, at the Eau Claire Curling Club. Delaney is Roessler's grandmother. Marsh and Delaney curl at the Centerville (Wis.) Curling Club.

Pat Borzi, a Minneapolis journalist who often strings for the New York Times, has a good eye for great stories. He recognized a golden opportunity when he heard of a fundraiser at the Eau Claire (Wis.) Curling Club. The Men's Olympic squad and the Skip (or leader) of the women's team would take on all comers to help raise money to send the olympians' families to Vancouver later this winter. As he told me "that's like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James heading down to the local gym to take on the guys in a pickup game." I shot the story in mid-November, and it appeared in the Times Dec. 15-16.

A friend reports from the frontlines of climate change

Joanna Kakissis was one of the five journalists in the Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism program at CU with me last year. Joanna was born in Athens, Greece, but grew up in Williston, N.D. She's particularly interested in immigrants and their stories (and she's particularly adept at such reporting, too, perhaps because of her finely tuned empathy). For the past few years she's been based in Athens, reporting for the New York Times and other publications. At CU, she focused on the climate justice movement and on climate refugees; people who are being forced out of their homes because of desertification (as in Darfur) or rising seas and mismanaged waterways (as in Bangladesh.) After the Scripps fellowship, she received an International Reporting Project fellowship, and headed to Bangladesh to report on what's happening there. Here's her report.

A beautiful place with some hard edges

Crestone, Colo., has been getting some buzz as "the new Sedona." Don't believe it. Sedona has become something of a New Age tourist trap. I've never been comfortable with the way Native American rituals and practices have been bent there to meet the needs of caucasian seekers. When you strip one element of a culture from its context (such as the sweat lodge, or fasting, or one tribe's concept of God) and then commercialize it, you risk all kinds of distortions. And outright danger. That appears to be the case in the sweat lodge deaths in Sedona in October.

Crestone's evolution as a tourist destination is happening in a much different way. There are 22 religious retreat centers in the area, but they are almost all attached to larger institutions and disciplines (Catholic, various branches of Buddhism and Hinduism). There isn't much in the way of tourist infrastructure in Crestone, but there are places to meditate for hours on end, places to chant and places to pray. The people I talked to there where distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of endowing the landscape (which is stunning) with special powers to relieve spiritual woes. Instead, they emphasize the idea of discipline and practice, of doing the work of the religion, whether it is Christian, Sufi, Hindu or Buddhist. See my story and photos in the Dec. 13 Minneapolis Star Tribune Travel section here.

Overblown, underreported Climategate

The e-mails that were stolen from scientists at England's top institution for studying climate change quickly became a political soccer ball for the politically motivated skeptics who seem to believe that scientists operate as they do — with an ideological ax to grind. (And judging from my conversations with relatively well-informed friends, the story introduced some skepticism where there wasn't any before).

There's been a lot of empty debate on the significance of the e-mails but very little reporting on how the e-mails were stolen, who stole them, what they say and whether or not anything in them actually diminishes the case for man-made climate change. (From what I have read, they don't in the least). My friend Keith Kloor at the Collide-a-scape blog has, as usual, been on top of the issue. This Wall Street Journal commentary piece is by one of the scientists whose correspondence was stolen. It's worth a read.

Scare tactics on climate change?

The debate on the scientific validity on climate change is artificially tilted toward the deniers in the mass media; under the mantle of objectivity, the tiny minority of scientists and larger group of politically motivated climate change skeptics get close to equal time to scientists who have spent years or decades researching atmospheric trends. While I think the lead on this piece from Reuters is misleading, I think what the scientist (Germany's top climate change expert H.J. Schnellhuber) has to say is very on target.