Nerd Alert: Books Edition

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how much can be gained by having a hopeful, rather than defeatist, mindset about climate change. The other day I was talking to a new friend about Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, a book that we both really liked and referenced incessantly for a year after we read it. The discussion (and the fact that climate change is often on my mind) sent me looking for news sources on climate change that are not just reactive disaster porn. There’s a lot of news about climate technology and climate finance, a lot of it fawning and TG2BT (too good to be true). Capitalism is not going to save us, guys. And yes, almost all of the true believers in climate tech as the solution are dudes.

The reality of limiting and reversing climate change is that the solutions are simple, but will take tremendous political willpower. It does not require gadgets and crypto; it requires accelerating the end of fossil fuel usage and the adoption of renewable energy. We don’t need ineffective carbon capture plants (facilities where industrial processes take place); we need actual plants (living organisms) that capture and sequester carbon at a scale far beyond what we are currently doing.

After I weeded through enough breathless climate change fintech bullshit, I found Bill McKibben’s newsletter, The Crucial Years. Each issue is a round-up of climate news and ideas and actions that are very manageable. I recommend you subscribe.

Slight tangent: I also recommend Sigrid Nunez’s books The Friend and What Are You Going Through. In one of the books (and I can’t remember which one), the narrator’s ex-husband is a thinly veiled Bill McKibben-type character who is known for his climate activism and for being very difficult but also mostly right about stuff. Anyway, read both of those books.

Speaking of Monsters (which I was, on Wednesday), I just finished reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, a satire of the publishing industry. The protagonist is the highly unlikeable June Hapward/Juniper Song, a flailing writer who steals the manuscript of her more successful friend when the woman dies and passes it off as her own. In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer asks what kind of female artists are monsters, and Kuang provides us with a few good examples: plagiarists, liars, and racists abound. I can’t say I liked Yellowface but it was well-written and very effective as satire. Ironically and/or intentionally, it’s on the Must Read list of almost every major publication’s book reviewer.

So that I don’t end this post on a sour note, I hope you all caught my friend Alissa’s pet peeves list last week. If not, allow me to share:

• People who stop at the top/bottom of the escalator
• Facetiming on cell phones in public
• Adult men wearing baseball hats backward
• Pajamas/crop tops/short-shorts on airplanes
• Any Colleen Hoover novel - puke (I haven't read them, but I still can't stand them)
• “Influencers”

A few more gathered from other friends:

• lakes
• the word “menfolk”
• the phrase “it is what it is”

And one more from me: People who call grown women “girls”

Keep ‘em coming, girls and menfolk!

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