Most Recent Posts

When Pete Olsen talks about drought on his fifth-generation dairy farm in Fallon, Nev., he's really talking about the snowpack 60 miles to the west in the Sierra Nevada.

The Sierras, Olsen says, are their lifeblood.

That is, the snowmelt from them feeds the Truckee and Carson rivers and a tangle of reservoirs and canals that make this desert bloom. Some of the highest-grade alfalfa in the world is grown here. And it makes perfect feed for dairy cows, because it's rich in nutrients.

But like much of the far West, northern Nevada is in the grips of a historic drought. The federal government has declared much of the region a disaster area. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is at historically low levels. That means feed will be in short supply, which is a big deal, because the alfalfa that's grown here doesn't just stay local. There's demand for it in California, Asia and beyond.

"Depending on how bad it is, it could be daunting to try and find all the feed that we need," Olsen says.

Even As Dairy Industry Booms, There Are Fewer And Fewer Farms Feb. 6, 2014

Many people may think of a "remote worker" as a harried mom in her bathrobe or a 20-something at a coffee shop. But that image doesn't actually reflect who is working outside the office, according to a new study.

"A remote worker, someone who does most of their work outside of their employer's location, is not a woman, is not a parent and is not a Gen-Y millennial," says Cali Williams Yost, a workplace flexibility strategist and CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group.

A Remote-Working Gender Gap

In fact, the study she commissioned finds that three out of four remote workers are men — of all ages – and just as likely to have kids as not. Yost and others attribute part of this gender gap to the kind of work women are more likely to do: jobs that can't be done remotely, like teaching and nursing.

The study, a national survey of full-time employed adults, finds that 31 percent of full-time employees do most of their work away from their employer's location, like at home, at a business center, shared office space or coffee shop.

The study also finds women are much more likely to work in a cubby or open office space, rather than a private office.

"And those cubicle, open-office-space workers were significantly more likely to say they did not increase or improve their flexibility last year, for fear of being perceived as not working hard, and [out of] fear it will hurt their career," Yost says.

To unscientifically test all this, I ventured into a Starbucks near my home in Washington, D.C. There in the back I spot a middle-aged man with a grande drink and a laptop.

Turns out it's Michael Gerson, a columnist for The Washington Post. "I do have an office, but I do most of my writing in coffee shops," he says.

All Tech Considered

Does Working From Home Work? It Helps If You Like Your Teammates

When Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, he left a trove of documents at his estate; many were thrown into a large reservoir. Journalists called divers and spent the weekend going over soggy papers in a house they had long been forbidden from entering. With the help of volunteers, more than 20,000 pages are now online.

Before they came to the expansive estate last week, reporters "had only been allowed to the front door to receive cakes on journalism day," as Drew Sullivan writes for the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Within hours of the president fleeing this past weekend, anti-Yanukovych activists from the Maidan group occupied his opulent estate, called Mezhyhirya. The images that emerged from that site depict excess, with gilded surfaces and expensive fittings.

Despite feelings of anger toward the former leader and resentment at his lifestyle, his estate hasn't been ransacked.

From the AP:

"The protesters' self-defense units were deployed inside the compound to maintain order and prevent any looting or damage to the property. One of them, a middle-aged man, could not hide his anger: 'Look how he lived, son of a bitch.'"

Cut to 1942, when Russians are sneaking across the Volga to strike German positions. To stop them, German Col. Peter Kahn (Thomas Kretschmann) manages to blow up a fuel dump, setting many of the attackers afire. In a deliriously impossible scene, blazing Russian soldiers continue their offensive, killing Germans as their own bodies char.

This brutal sequence is as sweeping as anything in Enemy at the Gates, the 2001 English-language Stalingrad epic. But then the movie shifts to a more intimate (and affordable) scale. A few survivors of the onslaught take shelter in a bombed-out apartment house. For most of the rest of story, they hold their position against the much larger German contingent outside. Eventually, only five Russian fighters remain, each waiting for a chance to demonstrate his noble spirit of self-sacrifice.

Just one tenant has survived the fighting: Katya (Maria Smolnikova), who's almost 19. To the Russian soldiers, she's everything they're fighting for — country, sisters, mothers, wives. Radio operator Sergey (Sergey Bondarchuk Jr.) is particularly taken with the girl. When not battling the Germans hand-to-hand in kung fu-style brawls, the men plan Katya's birthday party.

To balance this sentimental tale, there's a harsher one about another woman: Masha (Yana Studilina), who's reluctantly under Kahn's protection. Compared to his abominable commanding officer, the Colonel is almost a nice guy; he bristles at his fellow Germans' brutality toward civilians, but intervenes to help only Masha, a blonde beauty who reminds him of his late wife. The fate of one of these women will ultimately be revealed on the movie's concluding trip to Japan, which is just as disorienting as the first one.

This is the first Russian production to be presented in IMAX 3-D, technology that doesn't add much to the film but does distinguish it from the 1989 Russian Stalingrad (which starred Fedor Bondarchuk) and the 1993 German Stalingrad (which starred Thomas Kretschmann).

The spectacle, literally amplified by Angelo Badalamenti's strident score, helped make Bondarchuk's movie a hit not just in Russia but also in China. It faces much dicier prospects in the United States, whose filmgoers didn't grow up on the heroic national legend of Stalingrad — and lately haven't shown much taste for gory war sagas unless they feature aliens, superheroes or the undead. Indeed, for all of Stalingrad's curious developments and bewildering gestures, the strangest thing about the movie may be that it's even being released in the U.S.