The New Yorker & Me: February 5, 2024 Issue

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

February 5, 2024 Issue

This week’s issue contains a disturbing, depressing report by Elizabeth Kolbert. Titled “Burn Notice,” it’s a survey of recent books on the wildfire crisis. Kolbert asks what’s fuelling it. Her answer is climate change. She writes,

Another recent report, from the Federation of American Scientists, observed that the world is warming so fast that the models firefighters rely on to predict how blazes will behave have become obsolete. “Climate change is drying fuels and making forests more flammable,” the report said. “As a result, no matter how much money we spend on wildfire suppression, we will not be able to stop increasingly extreme wildfires.”

And, as Kolbert explains, these megafires are increasingly extreme because of the "CO2 feedback loop”:

When trees burn, they release the carbon they took up while growing. This carbon contributes to warming, which increases the likelihood of wildfires, which release more carbon, and so on.

This cycle seems impossible to reverse. We’re fated to a flame-filled future. What happened in Canada last year (loss of nearly forty-six million acres to wildfire) is just a taste of what's coming. It's hard to avoid the feeling that we're doomed.

Postscript: It's still winter here in Canada, but already there are over fifty wildfires burning in Alberta. The 2024 wildfire season is off to an early start.