Pollution News Update: First, Supreme Court to Consider Air Pollution Rules. In what is considered the most important environmental case since the adoption of the Clean Air Act 30 years ago, business groups who have failed to get Congress to gut environmental regulations ever since are taking their appeal for relief to the Supreme Court, attempting to argue that the EPA is overstepping its regulatory authority. Because newly promulgated regulations tighten up air pollution standards further at great cost to polluters, industrial concerns are attempting to reverse the principle that environmental regulations can consider health effects without regard to cost-benefit analysis. And: What’s This About Cultural Pollution? “Popular culture is getting more and more juvenile, and

the serious arts, or what used to be the serious arts, often emulate popular culture,

depressingly. But we can be disappointed in our arts without being made coarser as a society.

There’s a difference. Why as a nation do we periodically presume that society is coarsened by

culture? That’s the real question.” Although of course it’s not one or the other, I think the

argument is stronger that the degradation of culture is not a cause so much as an effect of

societal decay. Serious artistic expression seems to me to have lost the power to shape the

zeitgeist. A heroic, thoughtful artist can hope at best to reflect, and reflect upon, it. New York

Times