If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history...

Defendants in a case against one of the nation's strictest voter ID laws in Pennsylvania made a major concession to plaintiffs this week, just days ahead of the start of the trial over the measure.

In a stipulation agreement signed earlier this month, state officials conceded that they had no evidence of prior in-person voter fraud, or even any reason to believe that such crimes would occur with more frequency if a voter ID law wasn't in effect.

"There have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states,” the statement reads...

In May 1990, former (temporary) postal service employee Zonker Harris bemoaned an upcoming postage rate increase.  Zonker knew that, even after the five-cent rate increase, “US postal rates would still be among the lowest in the world” [1]. Still, he felt frustrated and “fed up” with the postal service’s rate hikes.

Unlike other frustrated United States Postal Service (USPS) customers, though, Zonker had a ready platform to protest this rate hike.  As a fictional character in Gary Trudeau’s long-running comic strip Doonesbury, Zonker commanded the attention of hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers every day.

Where other comic strips may have used the rate hike for an in-strip gag, Doonesbury asked readers to take the gag to the USPS itself!  The May 20, 1990 strip included two designs in a sheet of nine “negative 5-cent” imaginary stamps...

Andy Griffith was a genial and gifted character actor, but when he died on Independence Day eve, you’d have thought we’d lost a Founding Father, not a television star whose last long-running series, the vanilla legal drama Matlock, expired in 1995. The public tributes to Griffith were over-the-top in a way his acting never was, spreading treacle from the evening newscasts to the front page of the New York Times.

It was as if the nation were mourning its own demise. To commentators in the liberal media, Griffith’s signature television role, Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, North Carolina, was “one of the last links to another, simpler time” (the Washington Post). On the right, the sermonizers quickly moved past an inconvenient fact (Griffith made a spot endorsing Obamacare in 2010) to deify Sheriff Taylor for embodying “a time when television was cleaner and simpler” and for giving “millions of Americans the feeling the country stood for all the right things” (National Review). Among those “right” things was the fictional Mayberry’s form of governance, which, in the ideological take of the Daily Caller, demonstrated that “common sense and local control work better than bureaucracy or top-down management.”

In reality, The Andy Griffith Show didn’t transcend the deep divides of its time. It merely ignored them...

Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming “Harum Scarum” and “Help!” was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called the Castiles. The band was named for the lead singer’s favorite brand of soap. Its members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. The Castiles performed at sweet sixteens and Elks-club dances, at drive-in movie theatres and ShopRite ribbon cuttings, at a mobile-home park in Farmingdale, at the Matawan-Keyport Rollerdrome. Once, they played for the patients at a psychiatric hospital, in Marlboro. A gentleman dressed in a suit came to the stage and, in an introductory speech that ran some twenty minutes, declared the Castiles “greater than the Beatles.” At which point a doctor intervened and escorted him back to his room...

If you've ever fancied a quick pick me up at the beach, you may not have far to look.

Scientists today said they have found elevated levels of caffeine at several sites in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Oregon.

They believe the high concentration of caffeine could come from sewer overflows and septic tanks.

The problem is so bad that sea life is feeling the effect...

Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts. The scientists and other experts said the work was a giant step toward developing computerized laboratories that could carry out complete experiments without the need for traditional instruments. For medical researchers and drug designers, cellular models will be able to supplant experiments during the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield new understanding of basic biological principles...

Go to a spot popular with skateboarders today, and be prepared to encounter a curious breed: the senior-citizen skater. All things being relative, the skaters in question are usually between thirty and thirty-eight years old. There are still older riders, no doubt, but these must be classified as a shade more geriatric. It is possible that precise age has less to do with it than how often you step on a board. In any case, the breed tends to give itself away less by appearance than by their little pauses for conversation. “I used to have energy like that,” a specimen like myself might be heard saying wistfully between short breaths, indicating some limber teen-ager flying past. Alternatively, it could be a remark about the mysterious pain in their right thigh, or laughter as their whole lower half refuses to submit to even humble demands. Just as often, though, the talk is of ancient videos and favorite skaters from the past...

...Seeger had been a member of the Weavers, a quartet that was the last popular band of stature before the Beatles changed everything. The Weavers had been on the cover of Time magazine, and Seeger had grown accustomed to being recognized, but he didn’t like it. After his engagement with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the government set about damaging Seeger’s career. He simply walked away from the nightclub life and the fancy people and went back to singing in schools and camps, where he had begun. I can’t imagine a popular entertainer today who would go to jail for a year then throw over his or her career in order to embody a stand of conscience...

My introduction to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury happened around the age of 8, when I discovered my father's anthology collections. (I was extraordinarily up on early 1970s pop culture for a late 1980s grade schooler.) Reading the new strip and the daily archives is still part of my morning routine. But, given that I was born in 1981, I don't always get all the references. Sometimes, that leads me to discover weird bits pop history. For instance, the strip above ran on July 19, 1977. My first response this morning, "What the hell is Laetrile?"...