I've been puzzling over marriage a lot lately. I happened to recently read two works of fiction (ironically) that I thought depicted the beautifully flawed, human side of marriage that comes from two imperfect people making a lifelong commitment to each other. How on earth could that possibly be easy? Zadie Smith ("On Beauty") and Joseph O'Neill ("Netherland") have written, gorgeous unvarnished stories about marriages that have at the core of them deep love, commitment and hope.

We have been dreadful planet administrators to date. We have altered ecosystems and the atmosphere to the point of endangering the conditions that make Earth habitable. We came to create a smaller version of the planet in the desert of Arizona, Biosphere 2, and we saw what happened: the experiment ended in a complete fiasco. Meanwhile, we have overpopulated the Earth and have overexploited natural resources. Now we are altering the climate, and though we have scientific evidence and assume that we are intelligent, we have done virtually nothing to change our behavior.

As has been widely reported, when the election was afoot in Iran, neocon Daniel Pipes came out in open support of Ahmedinejad. In a talk at the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, Pipes said: "I'm sometimes asked who I would vote for if I were enfranchised in this election, and I think that, with due hesitance, I would vote for Ahmadinejad." He followed up on his blog, with a post titled "Rooting for Ahmadinejad."

Let's step back from whether we think that health care co-ops would be an acceptable substitute for a public plan, and focus on how to make them as useful and effective as possible if they are the chosen plan. This will help us to understand whether co-ops really are feasible or just a bamboozle. It is one thing to believe (as I do) that co-ops could be up to the task; to claim that the plan being considered is the way to get there is another kettle of fish.

This news story hasn't been covered as much as the protests in Iran or indeed the financial, parliamentary or any other crises recently, but an uglier side of one of Britain's favourite friendly countries was on display lately in the form of a spate of attacks on Indian students studying in Sydney and Melbourne.

After what his father made endure the Iranian people while in power, Reza Pahlavi is the last person who should give his input on this. He is at this stage the worst spokeman ever for this movement. It seems to me that he wants to exploit the situation for his own interest.

Today at the Farmer's Market in front of San Francisco's iconic Ferry Building I am signing the nation's first mandatory composting law. It's the most comprehensive recycling and composting legislation in the country and the first to require residents and businesses to compost food scraps.

In the books of the laws, God tells the Israelites his plans for how they should run society and their lives. Most of what we remember is the deeply personal 10 Commandments, that set out a relationship with God and with fellow people, but in very individual terms. But then God also gives another 600 commandments. And quite a chunk of these are actually more boring, but a few are real gems, and concern concepts of limited retribution and a curtailment of power over the weak. But the very core of the Social Justice laws is the law of Jubilee.

The city of Bozeman, Montana, is requesting that potential employees hand over the login credentials for any social networking sites they frequent. It seems to me that this idea is just plain wrong on so many levels, but also an invasion of privacy of all third parties that have granted privileges to particular individuals.

"Spoof paper accepted by peer-reviewed' journal" (2009-06-11, New Scientist) gives some details about Philip Davis (assisted by a member of the New Eng J Med publishing team), who had a computer-generated "research" paper accepted for publication (providing $800 was deposited in a middle-eastern tax haven by the author).

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