Weekend-Read

The cover of H is for Hope by Elizabeth Kolbert We’ve talked before about Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer whose words have reshaped how many of us see the planet we inhabit, her voice, sharp and measured, carrying the weight of a climate in crisis. This week, I read her latest book, H Is for Hope, a brief but potent meditation on the precariousness of our existence. The audiobook, which I listened to, clocks in at just over ninety minutes, far shorter than Kolbert’s previous works, but that’s intentional. Ordinary citizens don’t need endless pages of data — we need to feel, to feel the crisis as something visceral, immediate. ...

Photo by amine photographe Last weekend, I introduced Elizabeth Kolbert, one of my favorite climate and environmental writers. This week, I’d like to recommend David Wallace-Wells, the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. This book really opened my eyes to just how serious the challenges of climate change are. The idea of more than 2 degrees of warming by 2100 is grim, but I appreciate what David said in an interview: ...

I’m starting a new weekend tradition of recommending authors and articles that spark curiosity and reflection on our world’s future. Iceberg in Greenland. Photo by Jean-Christophe André This week, I recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s When the Arctic Melts from The New Yorker. (Link to the Internet Archive) Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, has a gift for exploring humanity’s impact on the natural world. Her writing combines scientific insight with moments of unexpected humor and hope. ...