New York Times Upfront articles from March 2009

New York Times Upfront archives from March 2009

For the first time in human history.(NEWS & TRENDS)(city population trends)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY, more people Live in cities than n rural areas. But this doesn't necessarily mean that they're living better lives. More than a billion people one third of the world's city...

Making the varsity green team.(ENVIRONMENT)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Friendly competition is helping to raise energy-awareness on college campuses. Students living in the Eco-Dorm at Central College in Pella, Iowa, can monitor each other's energy use on the school's Web site. To make sure they stay greener than...

A pill that navigates.(SCIENCE)(Intelligent Pill)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the 1966 sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage, doctors who have been "miniaturized" travel, through a patient's body in a tiny submarine to treat a deadly blood clot. The Intelligent Pill, or iPill--developed in the...

America's first chocoholics?(NEW MEXICO)(Maya of Central and South Africa)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Cylindrical clay jars found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico were unlike any other pottery found there, and anthropologists had tong puzzled over how they were used. Now the mystery may be solved: The jars apparently were used for...

The joke is in the notes.(COMICS)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Charles Schulz, the creator of "Peanuts," was going for more than a punch Line when he made Schroeder a Beethoven-obsessed music nerd. "The music is a character in the strip as much as the people are, because...

Friends--until I delete you.(THE WEB)(Facebook)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Facebook users--all 150 million of them--are still figuring out the etiquette of "un-friending" : how to do it, when to do it, and how to get away with it. "If...

Now made in China: hip-hop.(MUSIC)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... Over the last decade, many students and working-class Chinese have been writing rap as a form of self-expression. Rougher and more rebellious than the well-scrubbed pop music that floods China's airwaves, this kind of hip-hop is not sanctioned...

Numbers in the news.(NEWS & TRENDS)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... 790,000 NUMBER OF CARS SOLD in China in January, compared with 660,000 in the U.S.--the first time Chinese car sales have exceeded those in the U.S. SOURCE: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 650 NUMBER OF NEW OUTLETS McDonald's plans...

Are all forests created equal? As abandoned farmland in the tropics reverts to nature, scientists debate whether saving primeval rain forest is as urgent as once thought.(ENVIRONMENT)
March 16, 2009... The land in Chilibre, Panama, where Marta Ortega de Wing once raised hundreds of pigs, is now being overtaken by galloping jungle filled with palm trees, lizards, and ants. Instead of farming, she now shops at the supermarket and her grown...

Echoes of 1933? While the economy is in bad shape, right now it's nowhere near as dire as in 1933. Yet FDR's response to the Great Depression clearly holds lessons for President Obama and the nation today.(Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama)(Cover story)
March 16, 2009... When Franklin D. Roosevelt became President in 1933, the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. Four years after the 1929 stock market crash brought the economy to a halt, a quarter of the nation was jobless. Millions had lost their...

Coming home: does the American public have a right to see the country's war dead as they return from Iraq and Afghanistan?(NATIONAL)
March 16, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Every week, flag-draped coffins carrying the bodies of American troops arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. A chaplain says a brief prayer and then a military...

Language barriers: English has never been America's "official" language. What's behind the recent efforts to change that?(NATIONAL)
March 16, 2009... In crisp Japanese, City Councilman Eric Crafton read aloud his resolution to limit Nashville government workers to communicating only in English. "Kono jyoukyou wa kaeru bekidesu," said Crafton, who is fluent in Japanese from his Navy service...

1979 Three Mile Island: an accident at a Pennsylvania reactor transfixed the nation and hobbled America's Nuclear Energy Industry. Is it poised for a comeback?(TIMES PAST)
March 16, 2009... Sometimes, life really does imitate art. The China Syndrome, a Hollywood thriller about a fictional accident at a U.S. nuclear power plant, opened in theaters on March 16, 1979. Two weeks later, it got a big boost in ticket sales when Americans...

The color of success: a new study says red can make your work more accurate, while blue can make you more creative. But don't start repainting just yet.(SCIENCE)
March 16, 2009... Trying to ace your chemistry exam and figure out calculus, or are you writing a poem for English and dreaming up a project for art class? Either way, you might want to think about the color of your watts or even your computer screen. ...

Never again, for real: why President Obama should make preventing genocide a national priority.(OPINION)(Barack Obama)
March 16, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Some we see; others remain invisible to us. Some have names and faces; others we don't know. They are the victims of genocide and mass atrocities, and their numbers are too staggering to count. December was the...

Should colleges lift their ROTC bans? Some school says the military's policy on gays is discriminatory. But President Obama says it's time they welcome ROTC back their campuses.(DEBATE)(Reserve Officers Training Corps)(Barack Obama)
March 16, 2009... YES America's universities have had a tense relationship with the military since the Vietnam War. That's when, in protest, some of the nation's most elite universities kicked the military's Reserve Officers" Training Corps (ROTC) off their...

Cartoons.(Cartoon)
March 16, 2009... MOVE OVER A BIT, WILL YA? TAB (THOMAS BOLDT) * The Calgary Sun (Alberta, Canada) * CAGLE CARTOONS IF YOU DON'T GRADUATE UNTIL 2010, WHY'RE YOU HERE?... TO GET A GOOD SPOT.... MIKE LUCKOVICH * Atlanta Journal-Constitution *...

New features for teachers online.(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... THE NEW TEACHER TOOLS PAGE at Scholastic.com/ Upfront is designed to help you and your students get the most out of every issue of Upfront. BECAUSE PREPARING YOUR STUDENTS for the reading and analysis they'll be doing in cortege is so...

Paradise lost.(GRAPH: ENVIRONMENT)(deforestation)
March 16, 2009... Deforestation has been taking place for thousands of years, primarily as humans clear land for agricultural, use, logging, and urbanization. As the graph at right shows, in recent years forest depletion is concentrated in developing countries,...

Analyze the political cartoon.(CARTOON ANALYSIS)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 1. What two current news stories does the cartoon refer to, and what analogy is being made? 2. What do the donkey and elephant represent, and what do they hope to accomplish with their injection? 3. Who is...

Analyze the photo.(PHOTO ANALYSIS)(Brief article)
March 16, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [See page 12 in the magazine] 1. What is happening in this photograph? 2. Do you think Americans should have the right to see ceremonies like this? Why or why not? 3. Why might the Pentagon or the media...