In the age of climate change, "natuthan ever. We can absolve ourselves of responsibility for volcanic eruptions and earthquakes (except the ones caused by fracking). But the lengthening hurricane season, the floods, and the droughts? They've got our fingerprints all over them. Higher average temperatures and drier vegetation are making wildfires burn hotter and break out more frequently a development that was hard to ignore this past summer. Smoke from Canadian wildfires in June turned the skies over New York and Washington, D.C., a lurid, choking orange. A fire on Maui incinerated the town of Lahaina and killed nearly a hundred people. "We can't really call them wildfires anymore," a climate scientist named Jennifer Francis told the A.P. in July. "They're not wild. They're not natural anymore." Who or what we blame for such calamities helps determine how we respond to them. Call them acts of God or artifacts of nature's inevitable cycles, and we might just do nothing.
Big cities don't tend to burn on the scale they did in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, when conflagrations levelled vast swaths of London (1666), Moscow (1812), New York (1835), and Edo, now Tokyo (repeatedly), to name a few significant instances. Fire has become a different kind of menace, owing to modern extinguishing technology, professional firefighting forces, and, crucially, the fact that, in wealthier countries, we no longer light our homes and cook our food with open flames in neighborhoods constructed largely of wood. Wildfire smoke drifts into far-flung cities and pollutes our lungs, raising the risk of long-term health damage. Smaller towns in landscapes rendered combustible by extreme heat-the grasslands on Maui, the Sierra Nevada foothills in California-may be consumed almost entirely.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 09, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 09, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
