Clean energy businesses are continuing to boom in states like Colorado despite the tough economic climate due in part to federal stimulus money that the industry says has helped add jobs and spur interest in renewable energy development.  But subsidies for clean energy continue to lag behind other traditional energy sources like coal and gas. 

In Karen Russell's debut novel, Swamplandia!, set in the middle of the swamps of southern Florida, we find a fictional amusement park full of high-diving gator wrestlers. The park, the "number-one gator-themed swamp cafe" in Florida, is run by the Bigtrees, a family that invents their own mythology of being gator-wrestling tribal royalty. Swamplandia! closely follows the youngest sibling, Ava, who takes it upon herself to rescue the park from ruin after finances go south and family members disappear.

This simply must be seen to be believed.

Brought to my attention by former All Songs Considered intern and Monkey See pal Will Butler, this is a video from the Santa Barbara Middle School Teen Press, an outfit that haunts film festivals and other events to grab celebrity interviews.

Lan comes late to work and her boss screams, "You should have been here at 7 o'clock!" Lan says, "Why? What happened at 7 o'clock?" Yesterday, that was a joke. But this morning it is not funny; it is like the turtle with the beautiful shell. Flip it over and the animal is rotten.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was philosophical Wednesday about his first legislative setback as leader of his chamber, his failure to win an extension of several Patriot Act provisions.

You win some, you lose some, he essentially told reporters, speaking of the Tuesday evening vote in which defections by a few dozen Republicans left him on the short end of the vote.

Every year since Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, it had taken in more money through payroll taxes than it paid out. That is, until last year.

Social Security has now officially gone cash negative — and that means a nation that borrowed surplus Social Security revenues for decades will have to start paying that money back.

"President Barack Obama has written a letter honoring the 28 men who died when a massive radar tower collapsed in the North Atlantic 50 years ago," the Associated Press writes. "The hurricane-weakened Cold War radar station, called Texas Tower No. 4, collapsed during a fierce winter storm in January 1961." It had stood about 80 miles southeast of New York City.

Today, Los Angeles police said they arrested a 14-year-old boy who pointed a laser at a Boeing 737 landing at Los Angeles International Airport.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

People have long speculated about why girls love horses, according to Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.

By identifying with these dynamic, strong animals, Orenstein says, girls are expressing their own power.

"They're all active, they're all sources of power and motion and transformation," she says.

The Interior Department has decided that global warming is threatening the Pacific walrus — but the government has decided not to list them on the endangered species list yet.

The Interior Department is putting walruses in a kind of purgatory.

They join some 250 animals and plants that deserve the protection of the endangered species list, but they aren't getting it.