The difference between rich countries and poor countries is trust.

Slate takes a look at hybrid technology, with a local connection:

Hybrids Plus Inc., founded last year in Boulder, Colo., lashes together up to 1,200 lithium-ion cells the size of D batteries into pumped-up battery systems that can be charged in wall outlets. "In daily usage, we're seeing numbers as high as 137 miles per gallon," says CEO Carl Lawrence. Even with their Rocky Mountain-high cost—refitting a Prius can cost $24,000—the conversions are drawing interest from wealthy techies who gain psychological satisfaction from using less gas. (This is Boulder, after all.) The 15-person company has completed six conversions and should finish an additional 20 this year.

Prenatal genetic testing and relatively easy access to abortion leads to all kinds of questions about sex selection and eugenics:

What is a “designer baby” but a new consumer choice? When a vague, distorted feminism is conflated with enthusiastic consumerism, when “choice” is the catchword of both, designer babies can easily emerge as the natural, if not inevitable, next step in the evolution of our liberated, capitalist society.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow takes a thorough and honest look at disentangling the ideology of eugenics from the pro-choice movement, and is eventually led to this fascinating paragraph:

The first and least controversial task for pro-choice activists, then, is to make it very clear that the rights for which they have fought are fundamentally different from the right to determine the genetic makeup of offspring. Whether the latter right is legitimate or not, it is not the same as or an extension of the former. Pro-choice activists have struggled for women’s freedom to control their own lives and bodies, not to control the lives and bodies of their children.

Homeowner associations are taking away your right to dry:

The clothesline was once a ubiquitous part of the residential landscape. But as postwar Americans embraced labor-saving appliances, clotheslines came to be associated with people who couldn't afford a dryer. Now they are a rarity, purged from the suburban landscape by legally enforceable development restrictions.

Checkers is a draw.

Another town is switching to "shared space" traffic control - letting pedestrians and cars wander together without traffic lights. I think Boulder should be next.

I've mentioned this approach before.

These days, no one has any blue-collar skills. I can definitely relate to that; if I have to interact with a physical object other than a book or a computer, I'm pretty much lost.

Medicine and health are not the same thing:

If you would not pay for medicine out of your own pocket, then don't bother to go when others offer to pay; the RAND experiment strongly suggests that on average such medicine is as likely to hurt as to help.

Using graph theory to transplant kidneys.

"Somalia needs water. But it needs peace, too."