Most recent 30 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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The fusion breakthrough suggests that maybe someday we'll have a second sun - New Yorker (Dec 12) |
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Dec 12 · On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy: according to early reports, scientists at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant. It’s a breakthrough of great significance - in essence, the researchers are learning to build a second sun. And it was greeted with the requisite hosannas - the Washington Post described it as a “holy grail,” a “major milestone in the decades-long, multibillion-dollar quest to develop a technology that provides unlimited, cheap, clean power.” | By Bill McKibben Read more ...
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An Alaskan Town Is Losing Ground - and a Way of Life - New Yorker (Nov 28, 2022) |
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Nov 28, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Typhoon Merbok began forming in the central Pacific Ocean during the second week of September. Fuelled by unusually warm waters, the storm system moved north and east toward Alaska, and by the time it crossed the Aleutian Islands weather buoys were recording forty-foot waves and winds of seventy-five miles an hour. On September 17th, Merbok, which had been downgraded to an extratropical storm, reached the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and the Bering Sea inlet of Norton Sound, one of the strongest storms to hit the area in fifty years. In the barrier village of Shaktoolik, Merbok wiped out a protective berm. In Golovin, ... | By Emily Witt Read more ...
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Climate Change from A to Z - New Yorker (Nov 28, 2022) |
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Nov 28, 2022 · The stories we tell ourselves about the future.
Svante Arrhenius was, by nature, an optimist. He believed that science should - and could - be accessible to all. In 1891, he got his first teaching job, at an experimental university in Stockholm called the Högskola. That same year, he founded the Stockholm Physics Society, which met every other Saturday evening. For a fee of one Swedish crown, anyone could join. Among the society’s earliest members was a Högskola student named Sofia Rudbeck, who was described by a contemporary as both “an excellent chemist” and “a ravishing beauty.” Arrhenius began writing her poetry, and soon the two wed.
Physics Society meetings ... | By Elizabeth Kolbert Read more ...
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Journey to the Doomsday Glacier - New Yorker (Nov 28, 2022) |
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Nov 28, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
I first saw our icebreaker, the RV Araon, when we were due to leave for Antarctica. The largest icebreakers are more than five hundred feet long, but the Araon was only the length of a football field; I wondered how it would handle the waves of the Southern Ocean, and how it would fare against the thick sea ice that guards the last wilderness on Earth. Its hull was painted a cheerful persimmon color, and its bow was conspicuously higher than the rest of the ship, with a curved shape suggesting that icebreakers don’t so much carve through ice as climb and crush, climb and crush. It was January 3rd, summer in New ... | By David W. Brown Read more ...
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What Going Off the Grid Really Looks Like - New Yorker (Nov 28, 2022) |
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Nov 28, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
“In the United States,” Gertrude Stein once observed, “there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” That was true in 1936, when she wrote “The Geographical History of America,” and it remains so today. The numbers are startling, and not only if you live someplace like the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with your hundred thousand neighbors per square mile. Add up all the developed areas in the fifty states - the cities and suburbs and exurbs and towns, the highways and railways and back roads, the orchards and vineyards and family farms, the concentrated animal feedlots, the cornfields and wheat ... | By Jia Tolentino Read more ...
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After the Caldor Wildfire - New Yorker (Sep 19, 2022) |
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Sep 19, 2022 · Last year, the Caldor wildfire burned through a wide swath of California’s Eldorado National Forest, an area in the central Sierra Nevada that I hike every summer. I returned in August, exactly one year after the fire started, and found a Pompeiian landscape: charred stumps, sooty ponds, thick drifts of ash. A firefighter told me that clifftops a thousand feet high had glowed red from the light of the flames. In a meadow, I gathered pieces of burned willow to use as charcoal for drawing. A clear creek cut through fresh growth. From behind the branches of a thicket, a deer stared at me, unmoving. Birds sang from blackened trees; the wind scattered seeds. The sky was as blue as ever. | By David Garczynski Read more ...
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Charles III and climate change in the UK - New Yorker (Sep 16, 2022) |
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Sep 16, 2022 · I hold no brief for monarchs - I spent my boyhood giving tours of Lexington’s Battle Green, the sacred patch of Massachusetts soil where the Minutemen launched the fight against the crown’s colonialism. However, it is worth noting that the newest occupant of the British throne, Charles III, understands in fairly deep ways the climate crisis now imperilling our career as a species.
It is, as he said at the Glasgow climate talks last year, an “existential threat” that requires the world to go on a “warlike footing.” His language showed him to be a man who had studied the problem deeply: “As we tackle this crisis, our efforts cannot be a series of independent initiatives running ... | By Bill McKibben Read more ...
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“Too Hot Can’t Stop,” by Brenda Shaughnessy - New Yorker (Sep 05, 2022) |
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Sep 05, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
What an unusual winter, to last till fall,such a bad water this year, so full of elementsand hardly any specials.
I imagine the temperature had a hand in it,this new kind of hot we’re having, like the cloudspressed OFF on all the buttons
and seeped themselves away asocially.Early retirement in dapplement - all the branchessigned off. Leaves left; they fell well before fall.
The changing of the seasons went viraland now we have Sunter, Sprummer, Wing, and Wall.
One foot in flip-flop, the other snow boot.One hatchling learns to conserve energy (someone has to)detaching its wings, hitching a ride | By Bill McKibben Read more ...
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The Mail - New Yorker (Sep 05, 2022) |
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Sep 05, 2022 · Dhruv Khullar, in his excellent piece on India’s heat wave, discusses sweating as one of the body’s essential cooling mechanisms (“Fahrenheit 121,” August 1st). It’s interesting to note, too, what happens to this mechanism in extremely humid and hot conditions. The vaporization of one gram of water requires five hundred and forty calories, and that energy must come from the body. This is the miracle of sweating. But, if the air is already saturated with water, the sweat cannot evaporate, and thus it ceases to cool the body. Skin temperature, which is normally around ninety-four degrees, also plays a part in the equation. Objects warmer than that will radiate heat to the skin; at ... | By John Cassidy Read more ...
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How Did Fighting Climate Change Become a Partisan Issue? - New Yorker (Aug 22, 2022) |
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Aug 22, 2022 · In January, 2000, during the run-up to the New Hampshire primaries, Presidential candidates in the Granite State were confronted by a young man - a recent Dartmouth graduate - wearing a red cape, orange long johns, and yellow-painted galoshes. He called himself Captain Climate, and asked any candidate within shouting distance, “What’s your plan?” All the candidates ignored him, except one.
That candidate was John McCain, then the senior United States senator from Arizona. McCain went on to win New Hampshire’s Republican primary and then to lose the nomination to George W. Bush. He had been troubled enough by the shouted question that he returned to Washington that spring and ... | By David Rohde Read more ...
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Themes of the African Diaspora in “Black Atlantic” - New Yorker (Aug 15, 2022) |
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Aug 15, 2022 · The Brooklyn-based sculptor and L.G.B.T.Q. activist Leilah Babirye, who was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1985, was granted asylum in the U.S. in 2018, after being outed by her country’s notoriously homophobic press. Through Nov. 27, “Agali Awamu (Togetherness),” a towering ensemble of wooden figures (pictured above), which Babirye carved with a chisel and a chainsaw, is on view in Brooklyn Bridge Park as part of “Black Atlantic,” a group exhibition from the Public Art Fund reflecting on themes of the African diaspora. | By Helen Shaw Read more ...
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Congress Looks Set to Finally Pass Historic Climate Legislation - New Yorker (Aug 08, 2022) |
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Aug 08, 2022 · The longest-maintained temperature readings of any location on earth are in the Midlands of England. A monthly tally began in 1659, and the daily record dates back to 1772. One can imagine mutton-chopped clerics and ruddy-faced retired colonels, in the centuries since, tromping out to take those readings; some days it was hot and some days it was cold, but, until last month, the highest daily mean ever measured there was 25.2 degrees Celsius, or about 77.4 degrees Fahrenheit, in August of 2020. Then, on July 19th, as an epic heat wave swept across the British Isles, the mark was reset at 28.1 Celsius, or 82.6 Fahrenheit. If that hadn’t happened, topping the previous high by a full ... | By Bill McKibben Read more ...
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Living Through India's Next-Level Heat Wave - New Yorker (Aug 01, 2022) |
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Aug 01, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
The Bhalswa landfill, on the outskirts of Delhi, is an apocalyptic place. A gray mountain of dense, decaying trash rises seventeen stories, stretching over some fifty acres. Broken glass and plastic containers stand in for grass and stones, and plastic bags dangle from spindly trees that grow in the filth. Fifteen miles from the seat of the Indian government, cows rummage for fruit peels and pigs wallow in stagnant water. Thousands of people who live in slums near the mountain’s base work as waste pickers, collecting, sorting, and selling the garbage created by around half of Delhi’s residents.
This March ... | By Alana Casanova-Burgess Read more ...
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If Egypt won't free Alaa Abd El-Fattah, it had better brace for an angry climate conference - New Yorker (Jul 14, 2022) |
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Jul 14, 2022 · It’s an open question as to how much the United Nations’ annual climate conferences still matter - the young activist Greta Thunberg memorably summed up last year’s meeting, in Glasgow, as so much “blah blah blah.” But there’s at least one thing that this year’s session - scheduled for November, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt - should be able to accomplish right now, and that is to free Alaa Abd El-Fattah, one of the most prominent of the country’s reported thousands of political prisoners. In December, the former blogger and pro-democracy activist - who has been in and out of prison or detention for most of the past eleven years, starting before President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi came to ... | By Bill McKibben Read more ...
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Swamps Can Protect Against Climate Change, If We Only Let Them | The New Yorker - New Yorker (Jul 04, 2022) |
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Jul 04, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
It can be hell finding one’s way across an extensive boggy moor - the partially dry, rough ground and the absence of any landmarks let the eye rove helplessly into the monotype distance. Everything undulates, the rise and fall share the same muted palette, and the senses dull. But a swamp is different: in it, in addition to water, there are trees and shrubs, just as reeds and rushes are the hallmarks of a marsh. Although water and squelch are everywhere in a swamp, there are landmarks - downed trees or jagged stumps, a tenanted heron nest, occasional islands of high-ground hardwood stands, called “hammocks” in the ... | By Annie Proulx Read more ...
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The Supreme Court tries to overrule the climate - New Yorker (Jun 30, 2022) |
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Jun 30, 2022 · Credit where due: the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in West Virginia v. E.P.A. is the culmination of a five-decade effort to make sure that the federal government won’t threaten the business status quo. Lewis Powell’s famous memo, written in 1971, before he joined the Supreme Court - between the enactment of a strong Clean Air Act and a strong Clean Water Act, each with huge popular support - called on “businessmen” to stand up to the tide of voices “from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians” calling for progressive change. He outlined a plan for slowly rebuilding the power of industrial élites, ... | By Bill McKibben Read more ...
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Swamps can protect against climate change, if we only let them - New Yorker (Jun 24, 2022) |
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Jun 24, 2022 · This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
It can be hell finding one’s way across an extensive boggy moor - the partially dry, rough ground and the absence of any landmarks let the eye rove helplessly into the monotype distance. Everything undulates, the rise and fall share the same muted palette, and the senses dull. But a swamp is different: in it, in addition to water, there are trees and shrubs, just as reeds and rushes are the hallmarks of a marsh. Although water and squelch are everywhere in a swamp, there are landmarks - downed trees or jagged stumps, a tenanted heron nest, occasional islands of high-ground hardwood stands, called “hammocks” in the ... | By Annie Proulx Read more ...
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Could Google's carbon emissions have effectively doubled overnight? - New Yorker (May 20, 2022) |
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May 20, 2022 · The temperature in parts of the Antarctic was seventy degrees Fahrenheit above normal in mid-March. Pakistan and India saw their hottest March and April in more than half a century, and the temperature in areas of the subcontinent is above a hundred and twenty degrees this week. Temperatures in Chicago last week topped those in Death Valley. But, on Tuesday, three nonprofit environmental groups jointly released a report containing a different set of numbers that appear to be nearly as scary. They indicate that the world’s biggest companies - and, indeed, any company or individual with cash in the bank - have been inadvertently fuelling the climate crisis. Such cash, left in banks ... | By Bill McKibben Read more ...
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The biggest potential water disaster in the United States - New Yorker (May 11, 2022) |
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May 11, 2022 · The Sacramento is California’s largest river. It arises near the lower slopes of Mt. Shasta, in the northernmost part of the state, and runs some four hundred miles south, draining the upper corridor of the Central Valley, bending through downtown Sacramento, and, eventually, reaching the Pacific Ocean, by way of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Erik Vink, the executive director of the Delta Protection Commission, a state conservation agency, described the Sacramento to me as “California’s first superhighway.” By the eighteen-fifties, daily steamboats ferried passengers between San Francisco and Sacramento in as little as six hours. Travellers now mostly use I-80 to ... | By David Owen Read more ...
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Briefly Noted Book Reviews - New Yorker (Apr 25, 2022) |
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Apr 25, 2022 · Whole Earth, by John Markoff (Penguin Press). This biography of Stewart Brand, the creator of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” explores the varied career of a “quixotic intellectual troubadour.” An early techno-utopian - he coined the phrase “information wants to be free” and was the first journalist to use the term “personal computer” - Brand also organized parties for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and helped spark the environmental movement, befriending such luminaries as Marlon Brando, Brian Eno, and the California governor Jerry Brown along the way. What emerges is a view of an insistently holistic thinker unafraid to pursue idiosyncratic ideas and possessing “an uncanny sixth sense ... Read more ...
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