Shields and Brooks

Mark Shields and David Brooks analyze the political news of the week.

In the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts plays a scantily-clad file clerk in a small law firm who traces a cluster of health problems in a California desert town to a chemical in the groundwater there, and…

Oh to be Chris Hadfield, eating maple syrup from a tube and casually gazing down at a smoke plume streaming from Italy's Mount Etna volcano while performing experiments to improve the metal in turbine blades and dental fillings.

This animation shows the path of the magnetic field that was discharged from the sun causing the Curiosity team to power down the rover this week. The modeling was carried out at the NASA Goddard Space Weather Research…

A lab technician pipettes liquid into test tubes. Photo by Photo by Apostrophe Productions. Scientists nationwide are bracing for the impacts of the sequestration cuts, which are poised to strike a fierce blow to research. Policymakers aren't the…

The Doubleheader is back with the politics of sports and the sport of politics. Syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks and I tackle March Madness allegiances, the Oscar picks from last week (that…

The ocean, by some estimates, holds enough salt to cover the entire surface of the Earth, layered to the height of a 40-story office building. Much of the salt in the ocean comes from rock that gets…