Some tropical forests — in the Congo, the Amazon, and in Southeast Asia — have already shifted to a net carbon source. That means they emit more greenhouse gases than they absorb, worsening the climate problem worldwide. And signs are emerging that the health of California’s forests is fading, too.
The world’s treescape is undergoing a significant shift in real time. And with the situation getting particularly desperate, conservationists are beginning to rethink which species belong where. They’re even considering speeding up forest transitions, so we can get to the next phase where trees are soaking up massive amounts of carbon again instead of bursting into flames.
Forests are our last, best natural defense against global warming. Without the world’s trees at peak physical condition, the rest of us don’t stand a chance.
In the age of the rock-star chef, pop-ups are their world tours. They even have specially designed posters! And merch! Follow five hot young chefs on Instagram and you'll start to stumble upon pop-ups the way you do Bonobos ads. You'll learn that “pop-up restaurant” can accurately describe everything from a parking-lot cookout to a brand activation to a fine-dining experience. The only through line is that it's temporary—but even then, it might not be. Some pop-ups are sneak previews, market tests of restaurants to come, or offerings from brick-and-mortar spots on another coast. The triumph of modern pop-ups in dining culture, a decade after they first began emerging, post-recession, shows us just how transient our desires are. After a month of eating at pop-ups, I figured out only one conclusive thing about them: They are not so much about the food as they are about all the stuff around the food—how we eat, not what we're eating.
“Keywords” is a commentary on what it means to work in academia, but it’s also a meditation on what it means to work at all. Careful attention can help us discern what the language of achievement reveals, and also what it hides.
“The hard part isn’t living forever,” Rachel observes. “It’s making life worth living.” And the question at the heart of this wise and appealing novel is finally not how Rachel finds meaning in her eternal life. It is how we, despite our portions of sorrow, tedium and disaster, persist in finding meaning in ours.
The dog in Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, “The Friend,” is an almost mystically grand beast named Apollo, a 180-pound Harlequin Great Dane. His size corresponds to the grief Nunez’s narrator is living with as the story opens. Her much-loved friend and literary mentor has committed suicide; within about 30 pages, and reluctantly at first, the narrator is living not only with her grief for this man but with his equally bereft dog.
Folk is a special book: immersive and dripping with life, each story a spell, an allegory, a dark, smoky poem divined from the landscape of our ancient kingdom. A reminder that myths are vessels of truth as valuable in the present as in the past, it reads like a dream that, once visited, is difficult to leave behind.