The New Yorker: Science and Technology Newsletter

"Climate Change is Threatening Big Sur's Highway 1."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 18 May 2024, 1311 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

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In today’s newsletter, an iconic landscape in peril, and then: • Bill McKibben on the climate hazard of a second Trump term • A neuropsychologist asks whether forgetting can help us remember • What it means to send a meme

The Precarious Future of Big Sur’s Highway 1

How climate change is threatening one of the country’s most famous roadways. By Emily Witt Photograph by Ian Bates On the afternoon of March 30th, Magnus Torén, the director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library, in Big Sur, California, had a plane to catch, the first leg of a long-planned vacation in northern India. Shortly after three o’clock, he and his wife, Mary Lu, left their house in Big Sur and drove north along Highway 1 toward Monterey, where Torén planned to get a bus to San Francisco International Airport. But shortly after crossing Bixby Creek Bridge, the ravine-spanning landmark featured in the opening credits of the HBO series “Big Little Lies,” they saw a truck pulled over with its lights flashing. After a rainy weekend, a piece of the southbound lane of Highway 1 had slid into the sea. “It looked like a big shark had taken a bite out of it,” Torén later recalled. Keep reading

Bill McKibben

It’s a Climate Election Now

Trump’s reported billion-dollar offer to fossil-fuel executives shows that this is the key year to save the planet. Photograph by Doug Mills / NYT / Redux The Washington Post’s scoop last week that, at a dinner with oil-and-gas executives at Mar-a-Lago—according to people who attended—Donald Trump offered to reverse dozens of President Biden’s climate rules and regulations in return for a billion dollars in campaign money should have shocked exactly no one. Trump’s hallmark has always been his willingness to do deals—in fact, as he explained to the executives, a billion dollars would be cheap, given the tax and regulatory breaks that he would provide them. And his fealty to the fossil-fuel industry has never been in doubt: he is, after all, the man who pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. Keep reading »

Editor’s Picks

Books

Can Forgetting Help You Remember?

A neuropsychologist says that we’re thinking about memory all wrong. By Jerome Groopman Infinite Scroll

Who Wins and Who Loses When We Share a Meme

Two new books by art-world authors explore online shareability and come to different conclusions about what creators stand to gain. By Kyle Chayka Cartoon by Julian Rowe

More from The New Yorker

A Reporter at Large

A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?

Colleagues reportedly called Lucy Letby an “angel of death,” and the Prime Minister condemned her. But, in the rush to judgment, serious questions about the evidence were ignored. By Rachel Aviv  Books

Class Consciousness for Billionaires

We used to think the rich had a social function. What are they good for now? By Benjamin Wallace-Wells P.S. In 1966, E. B. White wrote about the devoted ornithologist and writer Edward Howe Forbush, Jr., who was a few pages away from finishing a three-volume summation of the avian scene (featuring friends) when he died, in 1929. White was enamored with the bird-lover’s writing, and offered this sample for those immersed in springtime sensations: “When the spring rains and mounting sun begin to tint the meadow grass, when the alewives run up the streams, when the blackbirds and the spring frogs sing their full chorus, then the Snipe arrives at night on the south wind.” 🪺

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