Alexis Madrigal tells an interesting story:

Among the terrible things we learned when BP’s blown Macondo well began spewing those 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico was that the oil giant did not have a magical petroleum-cleanup machine. Little did we know that one farsighted wealthy man had spent more than $20 million building just such a contraption, scaling it up from laboratory size to be Gulf of Mexico–ready. And who could possibly have guessed that that man was Kevin Costner?

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