December 23, 2017

From The Economist:

In fact, taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not an alternative to belching out less greenhouse gas. It is necessary in its own right. Unless policymakers take negative emissions seriously, the promises of Paris will ring ever more hollow.

From The Economist:

Sweden’s pledge is among the world’s most ambitious. But if the global temperature is to have a good chance of not rising more than 2ºC above its pre-industrial level, as stipulated in the Paris climate agreement of 2015, worldwide emissions must similarly hit “net zero” no later than 2090. After that, emissions must go “net negative”, with more carbon removed from the stock than is emitted.

From The Guardian (Anne Enright on "Best books of 2017"):

It used to be Plath, but now some part of every girl writer will want to be like Kathy Acker, especially those who are interested in pain; whether pain as kink or pain as artistic production. Her life was a hot mess, and these pages capture the heat of it. After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus (Allen Lane) is hectic, less than objective, very much alive. A cooler, more serene take on the subject is to be found in Bluets by Maggie Nelson (Jonathan Cape), recently published in the UK for the first time. This discussion of the colour blue is a gorgeous read, almost religious in the way it defaults to the beautiful and the sublime. Addiction, religion and beauty are also themes in Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty (Jonathan Cape). This reads like a book about a long-married, monogamous couple on a city break in Amsterdam. Actually this is a book about a long-married, monogamous couple on a city break in Amsterdam. What has that got to do with the sublime? As it turns out, quite a lot.

From Harper's:

Pre-psychopathic British boys tend not to want to participate in contagious laughter.

From The New Yorker:

In a year that too often seemed like fiction, my favorite novel was one that felt utterly true to life: “Conversations with Friends,” by the Irish writer Sally Rooney. It tells the story of Frances, a watchful, sharp-witted college student in Dublin and her best friend, Bobbi, who together fall into a risky intimacy with Melissa and Nick, a couple in their thirties with glamorous artistic credentials and a fraying marriage. Like the best coming-of-age novels, it captures the beautiful confusion of being an intelligent young person with lots of ideas about the world and no clue how to live in it. Much has been made of Rooney’s gift for capturing the gab of others, as advertised in her title. But fiction is really the medium of thought, and Rooney, who writes with commanding, unself-conscious lucidity, proves a terrific portraitist of Frances’s mind, with its peaks of humor and insight and troughs of poignant self-delusion. This is the first novel that Rooney has written; I was so engrossed in its world that when I finished it, I flipped back to the first page and read it straight through again. I hope her next book comes soon.