“Being alarmed is not a sign of being hysterical; when it comes to climate change, being alarmed is what the facts demand. Perhaps the only logical response.”
“It takes hard work to become a great artist, but it also requires something mysterious and intuitive.”
“Death is not a binary state or a simple biological fact but a complex social choice.”
4. The Nuns Who Taught Me Feminism
“At a time when violence against children, against women, against the displaced and against the planet is so pervasive, I find glimpses of hope in the nuns’ conviction that compassion can be taught and forgiveness fostered.”
5. The ‘Some of My Best Friends Are Black’ Defense
“Sometimes it’s the relationships that white people have with black friends that can lead them astray. They can be lulled into a false sense of familiarity that might have them pushing boundaries better left untouched.”
6. No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude.
“Ignoring email is an act of incivility.”
“Our modern existence depends on things we can take for granted.”
8. Life Without Plastic Is Possible. It’s Just Very Hard. + 9 Ways to Cut Down on Plastic
“Treating plastic like a drug habit that needs to be kicked is a lifestyle pledge being shared by more and more consumers, horrified by the tens of millions of metric tons of plastic created worldwide each year, much of it in the form of single-use items like straws, that end up in landfills or, worse, the oceans.”
9. A.S.M.R. Videos Give People the Tingles (No, Not That Way)
“As the industry has expanded, it has also faced resistance from those who see it as something sexual.”
10. Book Agent in the Morning, Carpenter in the Afternoon
“He spends most mornings at the McCormick offices in Manhattan’s flower district, (when the agency moved, Rift was tasked with fabricating new desks and bookcases for the space). Then, at around 1 p.m., he rides two subways to a desolate block in Ridgewood, Queens, to spend afternoons at his garage-turned-shop.”
11. Janet Malcolm: By the Book
“Why have a large library and not use it? Why keep books, if you are not going to read them more than once? For the décor? The answer isn’t entirely no. A book-lined room looks nice. I like walking into my living room and seeing the walls of books with faded spines that have accreted over many decades.”
12. How Wild Was Wild Bill Hickok?
“To succeed as a gunfighter in the American West, it helped to have a competitive advantage. Being fast on the draw was essential — and removing a revolver from a stiff leather holster was never as easy as Hollywood made it seem. But possessing good aim in an age of faulty, smoky ammo and inaccurate weaponry helped even more. The best shot in the early days of the era was the taciturn James Butler Hickok, who for no good reason earned the sobriquet Wild Bill. He boasted another advantage: He was ambidextrous, which meant he could fire off a hail of 12 rounds to the six by an ordinary mortal.”
13. Meg Ryan
“Even if you’re famous in just your office building or neighborhood, social media has given everybody the experience I had; more people are having the experience of cultivating other people’s opinions. Everyone is so happy on social media. It’s depressing.”
14. The Secret History of Women in Coding
“If biology were the reason so few women are in coding, it would be impossible to explain why women were so prominent in the early years of American programming, when the work could be, if anything, far harder than today’s programming. It was an uncharted new field, in which you had to do math in binary and hexadecimal formats, and there were no helpful internet forums, no Google to query, for assistance with your bug. It was just your brain in a jar, solving hellish problems.”
15. The Gay History of America’s Classic Children’s Books
“The authors of many of the most successful and influential works of children’s literature in the middle years of the last century — works that were formative for baby boomers, Gen-Xers, millennials and beyond — were gay.”
16. The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change
“The ultimate goal for air capture, however, isn’t to turn it into a product — at least not in the traditional sense. What Gebald and Wurzbacher really want to do is to pull vast amounts of CO₂ out of the atmosphere and bury it, forever, deep underground, and sell that service as an offset. Climeworks’s captured CO₂ has already been injected deep into rock formations beneath Iceland; by the end of the year, the firm intends to deploy 50 units near Reykjavik to expand the operation. But at that point the company will be moving into uncharted economic territory — purveyors of a service that seems desperately needed to help slow climate change but does not, at present, replace anything on the consumer or industrial landscape. To complicate matters, a ton of buried CO₂ is not something that human beings or governments have shown much demand for. And so companies like Climeworks face a quandary: How do you sell something that never existed before, something that may never be cheap, into a market that is not yet real?”
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