Book Review of Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food by George Pyle

Raising Less Corn, More Hell may sound like a rallying cry for the nation's heartland farmers, but this well-written series of essays by George Pyle is meant for those who eat corn. Or rather, for those of us who eat the livestock fed on corn in confined animal feeding operations, then wash down those meals with drinks high in high-fructose corn syrups. Pyle, an editorial writer from Kansas now living in Utah, brings his journalist's skills to bear on what our industrial food system has brought us. It's not appetizing as he makes his case against a corporate-controlled system that doesn't have to be this way.

Review of the Evidence Used In The Description Of Currently Recognized Cetacean Subspecies

We reviewed the subspecies listed by Rice (1998) and those described since (a total of 49, in 19 species), assessing them against the criteria recommended by the recent Workshop on Shortcomings of Cetacean Taxonomy in Relation to Needs of Conservation and Management (Reeves et al., 2004). The workshop suggested that the subspecies concept can be construed to cover two types of entities: a) lineages diverging but not quite far along the continuum of divergence (still having significant gene flow with another lineage or lineages) to be judged as species, and b) lineages that may well be species but for which not enough evidence is yet available to justify their designation as such. As a criterion for support of a subspecies, the workshop suggested as a guideline that there be at least one good line of either morphological or appropriate genetic evidence. "Appropriate" was not defined; the recommendation was that that be left up to the taxonomist authors of subspecies and to their professional peers. A further recommendation was that evidence on distribution, behavior and ecology should be considered not as primary but as supporting evidence, as there was not agreement at the workshop that such characters are necessarily stable (in the case of distribution) or inherent (behavior and ecology).

Review of Vivian Gussin Paley, You Can't Say You Can't Play

You Can't Say You Can't Play recounts a teacher's attempts to undo the habit of exclusion in her kindergarten classroom. In this case, the exclusion that has come to concern her is that which arises when certain children are consistently rejected from entering the other children's play.