December 27, 2017

From The Economist:

One way to create a market for NETs would be for governments to put a price on carbon. Where they have done so, the technologies have been adopted.

From The Economist:

[Politicians] must expand the focus of the 23-year-old UN Framework Convention on Climate Change from cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to controlling their airborne concentrations, suggests Janos Pasztor, a former climate adviser to the UN secretary-general. In other words, they must think about stocks of carbon dioxide, not just flows.

From The Paris Review (Nicole Rudick on Favorite Books of 2017):

It turns out that the books that top my reading list this year are, in one way or another, about intimacy. First, biography: Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker and Sam Stephenson’s Gene Smith’s Sink (which, full disclosure, I worked on as posts for the Daily). Kraus and Stephenson have written unconventional lives, approaching their subjects askance and with varying degrees of subjectivity. The lesson these books offer is twofold: no matter how much we nose around in another’s life, it is impossible to know that person fully; and the story of our lives is never really ours alone—the telling comes, in large part, through the words, observations, and experiences of those with whom we’ve shared time. Which brings me to Barbara Browning’s The Gift, a novel that incorporates discussions of music, dance, performance art, writing, and correspondence in order to describe collaboration, not just in the artistic sense but as a community of intimates—friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. Browning’s prose is open and unpretentious; I read her book deliberately, soaking up the fullness of each sentence. Last, a book that knocked me over: Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, a collection of poems about the deaths of black men and boys, about love and sex, about hope, and, above all, about bodies. The form each poem takes, particularly in the various ways the lines break (or don’t), creates an especial urgency, heightens the rhythm and emotion: “we say wats gud meaning i could love you until my jaw / is but memory, we say yo meaning let my body // be a falcon’s talon & your body be the soft innards of goats / but we mostly say nothing, just sip // some good brown trying to get drunk / with permission.” Another kind of recommendation: I’ve dog-eared nearly every page.

From Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny:

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not.

From The New Yorker:

Michelle Kuo’s memoir, “Reading With Patrick” (Random House), is a deeply moving account of the time she spent as a young teacher in a very poor county in Arkansas, and the interaction she had with a particular student, Patrick Browning. Patrick had been one of Kuo’s more intelligent and ambitious students, so when he is jailed on a murder charge, she suspends her own career (at this point, she has left Arkansas and has just graduated from law school) and decides to return to the Delta, to commit her time to mentoring him in prison. Anyone interested in questions of pedagogy, racism, and incarceration in America, not to mention literary criticism, will be enthralled by this book. In a way, it belongs as a kind of nonfictional counterpart to Erpenbeck’s novel, for it is powered by similar intensities of political humility and self-sacrifice. And Kuo’s gesture is rewarded: over the course of seven months, while Patrick is awaiting trial, she reads prose and poetry with him (difficult, serious work: W. G. Sebald, George Herbert, Ammons, Whitman, Baldwin, Akhmatova), tutoring him in how to read, but also delightedly watching him grow in confidence and proficiency as a writer. There is an astonishing moment of breakthrough when Patrick, whose prose was near-illegible when he entered jail, finally writes an exquisitely eloquent and lyrical letter to his daughter, Cherish. Patrick describes a dream in which he and his daughter are crossing a white mountain stream: “Across the stream, the smoke gray mountains of paradisal lines are clear in the sunlight.” Kuo, typically honest, direct, and unassuming, comments, “He had come so far, but what struck me then and for many years afterward was how little I had done for him. I don’t mean this in the way of false modesty. I mean that it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books, and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.” As with Erpenbeck’s novel, it is hard to read this challenging book—again, oddly neglected this year—and not think, You must change your life.