The topic of global warming is all the rage these days. It might seem annoying, but really, it’s about time this subject is getting serious attention. Back with another look is Elizabeth Kolbert, in her comment “Hot Topic,”where she tells us just who is jumping on the reality bandwagon. Those included: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who, in 1990, was noncommittal on the issue, and who now says they are 90% certain that human activity is to blame; President Bush. Sort of. He said the words “climate change” with a straight face, anyway; James Inhofe, the senator from Oklahoma, who is infamous for having declared global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” He ceded his chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee to California’s Barbara Boxer; and lo and behold! A corporation! Duke Energy, one of the nation’s largest electric-power suppliers, in a partnership with Alcoa, DuPont, G.E, and others, called upon the federal government to enact a mandatory program that would first stabilize emissions, then work to reduce them. Maybe we won’t die a hot, toxic death afterall!

In the Annals of Communications, Ken Auletta gives us “The Fixer,” a profile of the legendary public relations specialist Howard Rubenstein. What strikes me most about this article is the lack of tolerance people have for those who lead public lives. Of course there are instances when mistakes shouldn’t be brushed aside and merely forgotten. Can you say the Michael Richards, or Nazi Germany? But mostly, who cares if so and so smoked pot when he was nineteen. Or if X and Y were busted for underage drinking at twenty, an age when they can drive, marry, buy their own apartment, and go to war. And that affair, what business is it of yours, anyway?

If we weren’t so damn obsessed with “celebrities” their lives wouldn’t be any different than ours. Give them a break. Get your own life to worry about. Go make your own mistakes. And when you screw up, have the good sense to admit it and move on. And if you screw up terribly, well, maybe it’s time to reevaluate where you are in your life, and who you are as a person. Really, people like Howard Rubenstein shouldn’t even be necessary. But what do I know? I’m a total hermit. Most of the time anyway…

“The Missing Link” by Jonathan Rosen starts off with this sentence: “When he was twenty-four years old, Alfred Russel Wallace, the greatest field biologist of the nineteenth century, had his head examined by a phrenologist who determined that, while his ‘organ of wonder’ was very big, his ‘organ of veneration,’ representing respect for authority, was noticeably small.”

The article continues:

“Wallace was so struck with the accuracy of this report that, sixty years later, he mentioned it in his autobiography. It was wonder that drew him to nature, and an instinctive disregard for authority that made it easy to challenge an entire civilization’s religious convictions, as he did when, in 1858, he dashed off a paper proposing a theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Unlike Charles Darwin, who spent twenty years keeping a similar conclusion to himself in private dread, Wallace didn’t give a damn what people thought.”

So who is the true founder of the theory of evolution? Read the article and decide for yourself. But either way, you have to love Wallace. He’s a free spirit, a man unconcerned with petty jealousy or rivalry. And that alone makes him worthy of honor.