Rarely Seen Sea Monster Captured, Then, Following Script, Dies: “Yet another rare-freaky sea creature has made a rare-freaky video appearance — courtesy Japanese marine researchers — before being promptly declared dead.” (New York Times )

A report from Cambridge University researchers suggests that people lease clothes instead of buying them, in light of the resource impact of the textile industry. New York Times readers respond. The point seems to be to encourage reuse rather than discarding clothes. If leasing caught on, it would essentially be a piece of jiu jitsu to achieve an expansion of the second-hand clothes market. My guess is that tying the concept of leasing to the resource reuse meme will actually do little to promote it, given the intimate relationship most people have with their clothing. A P.R. campaign about the ludicrousness of buying clothes in response to everchanging notions of style foisted on consumers by the clothing industry (whether we are talking about high-end couturiers or The Gap), rather than durability and serviceability, would be energy better spent. Along with this should come efforts to encourage donation of used clothes or even the implementation of frank recycling systems similar to those in place for other resource-intensive genres of waste.