Science and the media: 24 - 30 December

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• James Fallows's long argument in the Atlantic that the world will inevitably rely on coal for many more decades—and that the US must therefore match China's seriousness about making the phrase clean coal more than an oxymoron.
  
• Another "Radiation Boom" medical physics feature article from the front page of the New York Times.
  
• A Wall Street Journal editorial accusing the secretary of agriculture of politicizing science.
  
• A Times op-ed about global warming and recent cold winters in northern cities.
  
• A Times Sunday magazine remembrance of Benoît Mandelbrot, the path-breaking mathematician.
  

"Clean coal": oxymoron? Let's ask China
George F. Will's 30 December Washington Post column in part discusses—and thereby raises the visibility of—James Fallows's recent Atlantic article "Dirty Coal, Clean Future."