Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Some news from the home front: Today the Columbia Journalism Review is live with an updated homepage design. We encourage you to check it out at cjr.org—where you’ll always find more features, podcasts, and special issues than we can fit in your inbox. And we hope you’ll invest in the work that we do by becoming a member or supporting CJR with a donation. In Silent Spring, the 1962 book that exposed the hazards of indiscriminately spreading the insecticide DDT, and other pesticides, across the American landscape, Rachel Carson wrote that the public was being “fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth” by authorities and the chemical industry. They were reassuring people that chemical insecticides were harmless to humans, pets, and plants. Carson’s research suggested that they were not—that they were, in fact, poisoning rivers, choking wildlife, and infiltrating the very cells that make life possible.…