The death toll from flooding in central Texas is unimaginable. The latest reports say 95 people are dead, including 27 children. Horrific. As they continue to search for victims–and brace for more rising water–journalists are asking questions about the efficacy of flood-warning systems as politicians urge people to avoid partisan bickering. But the matter of climate change must be addressed, writes Esquire's political columnist Charles P. Pierce. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a climate-change denier, despite his state's mounting natural disasters. How much suffering must his people endure before the very real threat of a warming planet is taken seriously? Read Pierce's latest column here. – Michael Sebastian, editor-in-chief Plus: |
|
|
Republican governors don't seem to realize that their actions—or lack thereof—have devastating consequences. |
During his tenure as governor of Texas, Greg Abbott has seen a catastrophic hurricane in 2017, a catastrophic ice storm in 2021, and now, a catastrophic flash flood that has drowned up to 100 people, including children at a Christian summer camp. How many of these have to happen before Abbott, a denier of man-made climate change, pays a price for them? At the very least, he is complicit in politics that hand-waves the climate crisis out of which these disasters are derived. And that's at the very least. Does barbed wire in a river on the border really count for more politically than twenty seven drowned children? The mind, she boggles. I'm concentrating a bit more on the state's reaction because the national reaction to the tragedy already has been bent by performative politics. |
|
|
This wasn't born from some dramatic rock-bottom moment with technology. I wasn't doomscrolling myself into despair. But as a law student at the University of Michigan preparing for finals, I'd noticed something unsettling: Even after deleting Instagram and removing social apps from my iPhone 13, I was still burning through hours of daily screen time. YouTube videos about subjects I had a passing interest in. Compulsive news checking. The endless, algorithmic pull of just one more thing. My breaking point was quite mundane. I tried to focus on reading for class, and there was this itch in the back of my mind. My friend had run a marathon, and I wanted to check Strava right then to see how he did. It wasn't urgent information I needed, but that itch became overwhelming. Inevitably, I opened my phone for one thing and found myself scrolling through ten others, pulled along by the notification cascade. So I made the switch. The TCL flip phone felt like time travel. Suddenly I was dragging music files from my computer like I did as a kid, planning routes ahead of time, and carrying actual books and a point-and-shoot camera. |
|
|
Do you ever actually look at the Billboard charts? On the album side, you find some surprises—in recent weeks, Sleep Token, Ateez, and Brandon Lake shot into the Top Ten. But on the singles side, other than Sabrina Carpenter's undeniable "Manchild," things are mostly frozen—how is it possible that "A Bar Song (Tipsy)," "Lose Control," and (good lord) "Die with a Smile" are still running things? None of the fine range of releases below is looking at that kind of dominance—the best any of the singles Lorde put out ahead of her new album did was Number 36 for "What Was That" and as good as Addison Rae's album is, it plummeted from Number 4 to Number 39 in a week. But from psychedelic hip-hop to cranky folk, from 20-something to damn near 80, from Sheffield to New Zealand, there was a whole lot of music to enjoy as spring turned to summer. |
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment