Thea Riofrancos in The Nation (illustration by Tim Robinson):
n 1957, as the postwar economic boom led to a “great acceleration” in hydrocarbon energy use, a group of scientists working for a Texas-based petroleum company called Humble Oil (later renamed ExxonMobil) embarked on a study prompted by growing public concern over air pollution and new research on the consequences of burning fossil fuels. What they found was that the “enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” in the atmosphere was linked to the “combustion of fossil fuels.” Sixty-five years later, reality has proved to be even worse than their findings. With the unchecked combustion of fossil fuels releasing enormous quantities of carbon, the world is now on track to reach 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. At the most recent UN Climate Change Conference, the assembled heads of state produced, yet again, zero binding commitments to reduce those emissions. And despite the green rhetoric, only 6 percent of the fiscal stimulus packages implemented by the G20 nations in 2020 and 2021 have contributed to emissions reductions, even as oil company profits soared to record highs. Amid government inaction, it has also become clear that the private sector will not save us. We’ve been told that benevolent investors would reroute capital away from dirty energy sectors and toward the green industries of the future. But the promise of “socially responsible finance” has proved to be mostly a scam. Despite pledges to do otherwise, Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, has continued to invest in fossil fuel companies, and the production of coal—the dirtiest fossil fuel—is now on the rise.
Meanwhile, with neither states nor capital doing all that much to slash carbon use, emissions have fully rebounded from their pandemic slump.
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Gordon Peake and Miranda Forsyth in Aeon:
When my parents first told me I was going to Hindu camp, I was not happy. And, to be honest, I was more than a little scared. My parents claimed they knew what was best for me, vom. Most of my summer vacations were spent back in India with family, so it was almost a treat to be able to stay home for once. I’d miss swimming at Park N Pool, riding bikes to Dairy Queen and picnicking at Idlewild Park. Why would I want my perfect summer in the ‘burbs to be interrupted by some stupid camp where I wouldn’t know anyone? Would there be bears? And even more terrifying, would there be cute boys?
Steven Preister’s house in Washington, D.C. is a piece of American history, a gorgeous 110-year-old colonial with wooden columns and a front porch, perfect for relaxing in the summer. But Preister, who has owned it for almost four decades, is deeply concerned about the environment, so in 2014 he added something very modern: solar panels. First, he mounted panels on the back of the house, and they worked nicely. Then he decided to add more on the front, facing the street, and applied to the city for a permit.
Marina Herlop
His huge Technicolor paintings, draped without frames, crossed over into sculpture — tabernacles to fearlessness and radicality. Hung from the ceilings or tacked to the walls, they looked like canvas mountain ranges or gigantic tents and huts, marching cities on the plain.
By the end of the twentieth century, a small number of international institutions had come to wield great influence over the domestic economic policies of many states around the world. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, in particular, made assistance to member states conditional on a broad suite of reforms, often with far-reaching political and social consequences. From Africa to Latin America to Asia, loans were tied to the balancing of government budgets, the privatization of state-owned industries, the removal of regulations, and the lowering of tariffs.
Despite thousands of years of research and an unending fascination with marine creatures, humans have explored only 
The series includes works that are part of Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema collection; many of these show at Anthology about once a year. But many do not. This is a rare opportunity to see, for example, Jack Smith’s unfinished Normal Love—although it won’t be the adventure it was when Smith himself projected it, narrated it, and once forgot the take-up reel so the film (camera original) unspooled all over the floor. At 120 minutes, it occupies the entirety of Program Six, and on Saturday plays back-to-back with Smith’s masterpiece, Flaming Creatures, and Ken Jacobs’s Blonde Cobra, a film for which the term “underground” could have been invented. Among other rarities: Nathaniel Dorsky’s lyrical Ingreen, sharing a bill with Andrew Meyer’s Shades and Drumbeats and one of the most influential films in the history of gay cinema, Gregory Markopoulos’s Twice a Man. If you are unaware of the degree to which the history of avant-garde cinema is inextricable from the history of LGBTQ+ cinema, the films just mentioned—along with Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job and Screen Tests (Reel 16), and Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth—make the case.
INCLUDED AMONG THE great literary felines would be the ninth-century Pangur Bán, written about by an Irish monk of Reichenau Abbey who enthused that his pet was “the master of the work which he does every day”; the witch-queen Grimalkin in William Baldwin’s 1561 novel, Beware the Cat, where “birds and beasts” have “the power of reason”; Montaigne’s kitten of which he asked, “When I play with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?”; Dr. Johnson’s beloved Hodge, of whom Boswell wrote that the great lexicographer “used to go out and buy oysters [for him], lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature”; and of course T. S. Eliot’s splendiferous Mr. Mistoffelees.
Researchers have used AlphaFold — the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) network — to predict the structures of more than 200 million proteins from some 1 million species, covering almost every known protein on the planet.
Some analysts now fear that the long decline of interstate war may be about to reverse. In an article for The Economist published shortly before the Russian invasion, the Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari declared the decline in international war to be “the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilization.” But he also worried that a war in Ukraine could bring about “a return to the law of the jungle.” In an