Sublime

The very same qualities that have made the “domestic fishes” famous in China have made them infamous in the United States. A well-fed grass carp can weigh more than eighty pounds. In a single day it can eat almost half of its body weight, and it lays hundreds of thousands of eggs at a time. Bigheads can, on occasion, weigh as much as a hundred poun

The sea was always heaving things up and hurling them back: fishing lines, floats, beer cans, plastic toys, tampons, Nike sneakers. A few years earlier it was severed feet. People were finding them up and down Vancouver Island, washed up on the sand. One had been found on this very beach.

In 1920, New Orleans boasted six pumping stations, including the Melpomene. These allowed “the old swamps” to be drained and converted into new communities, like Lakeview and Gentilly. Today there are twenty-four stations, which together operate one hundred and twenty pumps. During a storm, rain is funneled into a Venice’s-worth of canals. Then it’

(A Brita filter, like other pitchers certified by the NSF/ANSI Standard 42, will substantially reduce some of these chlorine by-products, but it won’t eliminate any of them. Brita is, by the way, owned by the Clorox Company.)

Federal law requires the EPA to prove that the cost of removing a contaminant doesn’t exceed its benefits (deaths averted, that is, with a human life valued at $6.1 million).

In 2006, ads for Fiji Water stated, “The Label Says Fiji Because It’s Not Bottled in Cleveland.” Annoyed, Cleveland officials tested the import and found 6.3 micrograms of arsenic per liter. City tap had none. (The EPA’s maximum allowed level is 10 micrograms per liter.)