5 smart reads for the weekend

It's not as if John Andrew Boehner is a mysterious figure on Capitol Hill. He is what he is: A business-friendly conservative with a genuine aversion to taxes, regulations and earmarks; a pinstriped fundraising machine who once distributed campaign checks from a tobacco company on the House floor; a loyal Republican whose occasional drifts from the party line (on issues such as immigration and China) have tended to match those of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He's a patient leader who doesn't often pop off like Gingrich or bang heads like Tom DeLay; he's an even-keeled process guy who rhapsodizes about his love for the "people's House." None of that means he's a centrist or a moderate. "I have one of the most conservative voting records in the House," he told Time at the start of this Congress. "But I don't wear it on my sleeve. I don't shove it in people's faces." [TIME]

The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted. Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years. [Mother Jones]

[Amwell] township sits atop the Marcellus Shale Deposit, one of the largest fields of natural gas in the world, a formation that stretches beneath 575 miles of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. Shale gas, even its fiercest critics concede, presents an opportunity for the United States to be less dependent on foreign oil. According to Wood Mackenzie, an energy-consulting firm, the Marcellus formation will supply 6 percent of America’s gas this year, a figure expected to more than double by 2020. About five years ago, leases began to appear in the mailboxes of residents of Amwell Township from Range Resources, a Texas-based oil company seeking to harvest gas through hydraulic fracturing. “Fracking,” as it is known, is a process of natural-gas drilling that involves pumping vast quantities of water, sand, and chemicals thousands of feet into the earth to crack the deep shale deposits and free bubbles of gas from the ancient, porous rock. Harvesting this gas promises either to provide Americans with a clean domestic energy source or to despoil rural areas and poison our air and drinking water, depending on whom you ask. [New York Times]

Here's the core principle: We want to create a place where readers — and readers alone — sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way. The decision on advertising was the hardest, because obviously it provides a vital revenue stream for almost all media products. But we know from your emails how distracting and intrusive it can be; and how it often slows down the page painfully. And we're increasingly struck how advertising is dominated online by huge entities, and how compromising and time-consuming it could be for so few of us to try and lure big corporations to support us. We're also mindful how online ads have created incentives for pageviews over quality content. [Daily Beast]

Clark himself liked jazz, listened to DJs like Freddie Robbins and Symphony Sid on WOV in New York. Dick had wanted to be a disk jockey since age 13 after he saw Garry Moore and Jimmy Durante doing a radio program; he went to Syracuse University, and in his first year got a spot on the campus station. For his audition, he did an imitation of a radio announcer. He did impersonations in high school, he said, "to get over a terrible inferiority complex... I was not physically terribly attractive. I was skinny and I had a lot of pimples like everybody else did, and I was going through that teenage thing of 'I don't want to get involved with too many people.'" His mimickry was apparently enough to cover up some of the blemishes, and Clark got elected class president in his senior year. [Rolling Stone]