Drink Like a Communist | Impeachment Warning Signs

The political path forward is a perilous one, and they should know.

It was the heart of the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings in the ’90s, and Jack Kingston remembers wondering after a meeting with his Republican colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives: “Surely there is more?”

The Ken Starr independent counsel probe, launched in 1994 to investigate shady financial dealings by the Clinton family, had become almost entirely fixated on a stained blue dress. Yes, Clinton had lied under oath and appeared to have obstructed justice. But while the sex scandal made headlines, the “empirical question” of the case — did Clinton pay off officials, evade taxes or create phony corporations to mask financial wrongdoing? — wasn’t so clear. And “if you can’t prove that empirical question, you’ve lost it,” says Kingston, who is now at the lobby firm Squire Patton Boggs.

Eco-friendly gyms and products promise to help you breathe better as you work out. But how much are they helping the environment?

Back in 2008, Adam Boesel could be found messing around with a spin bike in his house. After some tinkering, he attached a small, wind-turbine-like device to the bicycle so that the motor could function like a generator. Buoyed by this success, Boesel began retrofitting treadmills and ellipticals so that the energy generated by their use could be fed back to the grid. That, in turn, led him to open a facility called The Green Microgym in Portland, Oregon.

Boesel isn’t the only player in the fitness industry connecting the dots between exercise and our energy footprint. It’s a business decision as much as an environmental one. Research in recent years, such as a 2014 study of fitness centers in Lisbon, Portugal, has shown that gyms experience heightened carbon dioxide concentration and that higher occupancy correlates with the concentration of particulate matter in the air.

Santiago Rivas is challenging broken politics with some hilarious ideas.

The world’s colonizing powers once fussed over how to slice up their empires into brand new nation-states that would bloom into beautiful, modern democracies.

But some figures in the post-colonial world say they are fed up with the ugly realities that curdle beneath their nation-states’ sparkling constitutions. Santiago Rivas Camargo is one of them. This Colombian comic wants to end Latin America’s defective nation-states once and for all.

“For me, countries don’t make sense,” says 37-year-old Rivas, a bearded, bowling ball of a man who friends say floats like a feather despite his size. “I think everywhere you look countries are going through a crisis of meaning. OK, maybe Sweden shouldn’t have to go. But in Latin America? Come on, there are some countries that just didn’t work out.”