The Atlantic website has a long essay (some 5000 words at an estimate) by Jonathan Haidt, to appear in the May 2022 print edition.
The Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt, 11 April 2022: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, subtitled, “It’s not just a phase.”
Quick post for today. Here’s an item in today’s paper about Barnes & Noble, which makes some points similar to my discussion here on the 11th.
NYT, Elizabeth A. Harris, posted 15 April 2022, in print today: How Barnes & Noble Went From Villain to Hero, subtitled, “To independent booksellers, the enormous chain was once a threat. Now it’s vital to their survival. And it’s doing well.”
Two or three major items to cover, from this past week, but for today just this one, apropos my review of the David Wallace-Wells book.
Opening lines:
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.
None of this is true.
David Wallace-Wells, THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books, Feb 2019)
Slate, Jeff Deutsch, 9 April 2022: What Kind of Bookstore Browser Are You?, subtitled “We booksellers have seen it all.”
NYT, front page article today, posted yesterday 9 Apr 2022: Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War, subtitled, “Citizens are denouncing one another, illustrating how the war is feeding paranoia and polarization in Russian society.”
More on the theme of, why now? Some of the reasons are eternal; that certain themes seem to be more apparent currently may just be random variation in the news of the day. (I saw a comment somewhere about the NYT story I posted about two days ago wondering why the NYT thought this was news; it’s not new.)
