As a pandemic hijacked the nation’s attention, we pushed aside other, even bigger problems. But now that COVID-19 is being cornered, the crisis of climate change is returning to page one. The threat of a rapidly warming planet is actually harder to deal with. It can’t be fixed with a vaccine. Slower-moving, it’s easier to […]

In driving down Main Street in Santa Monica on last Saturday night, you might think the pandemic is over everywhere, with people drinking and laughing, lines for drinks … Honest to God, they’re partying. There aren’t a lot of masks – it’s hard to drink a cold one with a mask. Just one problem: The […]

There was a white oak tree in Athens, GA, that was so treasured by the locals it was not owned by anyone, not even the city. It was an autonomous entity known as the The Tree that Owns Itself. Around the 1820s, William Jackson, owner of the property where the oak resided, wrote a formal […]

“Yay for science,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said quietly as famed photographer Annie Leibovitz got the shot, no pun intended. Hooray, indeed. Science worked. Science – that is, people – managed to do in one year what usually takes 10 to 15 years. There is […]

It is hard to imagine anything more exhausting than the constant indignation of so-called conservatives, who somehow sustain a state of rigid, barking anger over the state of American culture. To them, every advance for human rights represents the imminent end of civilization, and every small effort to assuage historical injuries signals the twilight of […]