Most recent 10 articles: New Yorker
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How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst - New Yorker (May 22) |
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May 22 · In another time, or another place, Lucy Easthope says, she would have been a fortune-teller - a woman of opaque origin and beliefs, who travelled from campfire to town square, speaking of calamities that had come to pass and those which hung in the stars. Easthope, who is forty-four, is one of Britain’s most experienced disaster advisers. She has worked on almost every major emergency involving the deaths of British citizens since the September 11th attacks, a catalogue of destruction and surprise that includes storms, suicide bombings, air crashes, and chemical attacks. Depending on the assignment, Easthope might find herself immersed at a scene for days, months, or years. “I am ... | By Sam Knight Read more ...
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Briefly Noted Book Reviews - New Yorker (Mar 20) |
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Mar 20 · The Great Displacement, by Jake Bittle (Simon & Schuster). Roving across the United States, this survey explores the precarious environments in which many Americans now live, places irreversibly altered by floods, fires, hurricanes, and drought. “Managed retreat” is a popular term in climate discourse, but whole communities, from Arizona ranchers to Indigenous tribes in Louisiana, face disaster without any sort of plan. Victims of megafires in California find themselves at the mercy of the state’s housing crunch. Bittle argues that the approaches of both government and the insurance industry are totally inadequate for today’s dilemmas: Where should we build? What should we protect? ... | By Cal Newport Read more ...
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Why SUVs are still a huge environmental problem - New Yorker (Mar 3) |
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Mar 3 · Last year, the world’s S.U.V.s collectively released almost a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. If all the vehicles got together and formed their own country, it would be the world’s sixth-largest emitter, just after Japan. This is a disturbing figure, but, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, it gets worse. Globally, S.U.V. sales continue to grow, even though, last year, total passenger-vehicle sales fell. And the trend has now spread to electric vehicles: in 2022, for the first time, the sale of electric S.U.V.s edged out the sale of other electric cars.
The move toward bigger and heavier vehicles, it seems pretty obvious, is incompatible with ... | By Elizabeth Kolbert Read more ...
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“Weather Conditions,” by Clarence Major - New Yorker (Jan 16) |
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Jan 16 · Meteorologist says, “For your local weather,
here is a quick peek out your window.”
You look: you see houses leaning against one another for support -
as if the whole world is falling apart.
On a front porch, a woman is breastfeeding a newborn and
you know a pointless war rages on, on the other side of the river.
You see that poor beggar family with a little boy
walking along the winter beach. You see the retired general
going to the bar for his morning coffee.
Using your binoculars, you see through the window
of the watering hole a shivering couple huddled together
at a table in the corner. Two tables away, the ... | By Anjali Chandrashekar Read more ...
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Off the Grid in the Big City - New Yorker (Jan 16) |
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Jan 16 · Kudos to you! You’ve decided to do your part in saving the planet by going off the grid. Not keen on relocating to Maine or Montana? Manhattan works just fine. Josh Spodek went off the grid in May in his studio apartment in the West Village. He just disconnected the circuit breaker, and now his carbon footprint is about that of three average-sized house cats. Good news! Spodek has invited you over to show you the ropes. He’s the lean guy with the spiky brown hair and brown hiking shirt. Hungry? There’s some leftovers from yesterday’s solar-powered no-packaging vegan stew, which has been sitting out overnight, and which Spodek has sniffed, declaring, “I don’t think you’ll ... | By Elizabeth Kolbert Read more ...
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A Hawaiian Volcano vs. the Keeling Curve - New Yorker (Jan 2) |
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Jan 2 · Mauna Loa, the world’s biggest active volcano, on Hawaii’s Big Island, erupted last month, after almost four quiet decades. As lava oozed down the mountainside, residents packed go bags and amateur volcanologists flew in. Some Hawaiians came to make offerings to the goddess Pele; the mayor warned spectators not to throw marshmallows. Amid the hoopla, the lava shut down some scientific instruments. “We didn’t want to set a new record for the biggest hole in the curve,” Tim Lueker, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said recently. He meant the Keeling Curve - an authoritative illustration that the planet is warming - which had been tracking carbon dioxide almost ... | By Amanda Petrusich Read more ...
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From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution - New Yorker (Dec 27) |
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Dec 27 · There are about a hundred and forty million homes in the United States. Two-thirds, or about eighty-five million, of them are detached single-family houses; the rest are apartment units or trailer homes. That’s what American prosperity looks like: since the end of the Second World War, our extraordinary wealth has been devoted, above all, to the project of building bigger houses farther apart from one another. The great majority of them are heated with natural gas or oil, and parked in their garages and driveways or on nearby streets are some two hundred and ninety million vehicles, an estimated ninety-nine per cent of which, as of August, run on gasoline. It took centuries to build ... | By Bill McKibben Read more ...
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The Mail - New Yorker (Dec 26) |
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Dec 26 · Elizabeth Kolbert, in her sweeping survey of climate change (“A Vast Experiment,” November 28th), makes a stimulating contribution to the national conversation about this challenge. I especially appreciated her discussion of the role of narratives in spurring (or stalling) action. As Kolbert points out, pessimistic narratives can be limiting. But, in the U.S., examples of making radical change to curb or adapt to the climate crisis are hard to come by. If we incorporated instances of progress into our story of the crisis, perhaps our culture would be more deeply engaged with transitioning to sustainable energy.
One generative source of alternative narratives is Europe, where ... | By Ed Caesar Read more ...
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Tragicomic Creatures Great and Small - New Yorker (Dec 26) |
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Dec 26 · Imperilled fantastical beasts drawn by a great.
For several years, until the pandemic and declining health dictated otherwise, Edward Koren, who turned eighty-seven this month, made a point of trading life in northern New England for a few weeks in Paris, where he set up shop at Idem, the still thrumming nineteenth-century printing studio in Montparnasse. A contributor to The New Yorker for sixty years - more than a thousand cartoons and thirty-one covers, and counting - Ed has always been an eclectic cottage industrialist, bringing forth sui-generis art and artifacts (drawings, lithographs, books, utilitarian ceramics, wood sculptures, repurposed household objects), each of ... | By Ed Caesar Read more ...
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The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer - New Yorker (Dec 19) |
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Dec 19 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
On the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California, between the orchards and the ocean, sits an inconspicuous warehouse, its windows tinted brown and its exterior painted a dull gray. The facility has almost no signage, and its name doesn’t appear on Google Maps. A small label on the door reads “Google AI Quantum.” Inside, the computer is being reinvented from scratch.
In September, Hartmut Neven, the founder of the lab, gave me a tour. Neven, originally from Germany, is a bald fifty-seven-year-old who belongs to the modern cast of hybridized executive-mystics. He talked of our quantum future with a blend of ... | By Janet Malcolm Read more ...
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