In certain dialects of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, the word for ‘four’ sounds very similar to the word for ‘death’1. Consequently, the number 4 is considered by many people in East Asian nations to be unlucky. It is not unusual for buildings in that region to skip the number 4 when labeling floors, much in the same way 13th floors... See more
Malm and Carton consider and dismantle the optimism of carbon capture and geoengineering, and they pile up evidence for the extraordinary financial investment since 2020 in what they call “fossil capital.” Any meaningful energy transition would make those immense pools of capital worthless—oil that can’t be pumped, pipelines that can’t be used,... See more
Despite all the disasters, all the models, and all the conferences, in 2022 there were at least 119 oil pipelines in development around the world, plus 447 gas pipelines, 300 gas terminals, 432 new coal mines, and 485 new coal power plants. As the historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz showed in his recent book More and More and More, despite... See more
If you want to know what a technological republic might look like, forget Alexander Karp’s insipid book; consider what is being constructed around you, and how little it resembles any kind of republic at all. Consider the bad times, and who they are good for.
Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don’t entirely exist and the feelings and... See more
As guards were hired and prisons expanded, they had to be filled. The people sent to them came mostly from one layer of society, the poorest—suggesting that it is fate of origin, even more than character, that informs destiny. It simply can’t be a coincidence that very few middle-class people end up in prison. Calls like Kakutani’s to leave the... See more