“Around the globe, people are seeing more dramatic swings between dry-to-wet and wet-to-dry weather whiplash. Scientists say more such episodes of “hydroclimate whiplash” are anticipated worldwide because of human-caused global warming.”

“Despite focus on the climate crisis drifting away among many politicians and activists, many Americans are grasping the connection between rising temperatures and rising bills.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Still the best version of this scene, due to Edward Woodward & George C. Scott, and also because Charles Dickens, writing in 1843, understood the vanities, anxieties, and insecurities of the new middle class and new elites of capital and industry better than almost any other writer ever has.

NORAD Santa tracker is Woke

The massive California floods in 1862 are not well known or remembered, but warn us that a place prone to drought is also prove to huge flooding events, and will experience them again in the future.

Cherokee Removal, racial violence, confederate poets, real estate schemes, dead recreationalists, and a drought disaster waiting to happen, Lake Lanier, Atlanta’s only big reservoir, has the southern history & southern gothic to earn its foreboding reputation. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Oscars attendees always leave with gift bags…But in 2025, they received a grimmer gift: a yearlong subscription to a white-glove disaster recovery service called Bright Harbor, which has grown popular in the wake of the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles last January. grist.org/economics/wh...

Soskin shared her personal experiences and those of African American workers during the war at Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, CA: “What gets remembered is a function of who’s in the room doing the remembering.” www.kqed.org/news/1206821...

Almost Australian-style summer Xmas incoming for much of the USA🎄🥵🎄

“The monster conflagrations of 2025 proved that despite the deep archive of local calamity, the spectacular topography of peril and the convergence of climate change and wildland intrusion, equal doses of distraction and denial kept us unprepared for the inevitable.” www.latimes.com/after-the-fi...

These TCM remembrances of people in film are always good, but this one is an exceptionally lovely meditation on an especially sad year.

Gift article. Cities built on the assumption of limitless growth are confronting reality: Las Vegas & Phoenix…are now debating moratoria, tighter planning rules & growth management. Water scarcity has exposed the costs of assuming that physical limits don’t apply. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/o...

“Experts said the water systems in Pacific Palisades and Altadena were never designed for wildfires that rage through entire neighborhoods, or for infernos intensified by climate change…their design effectively guaranteed that hydrants would lose pressure and fail during a giant fire.”

Edison is now offering to directly pay fire victims for their losses if they give up their right to file a lawsuit… But [is] Edison’s program forcing the victims who are the most desperate for financial support to give up their legal right to fair compensation? www.latimes.com/environment/...

NEVADA CURRENT: California, the biggest water user in the basin, pitches Colorado River framework mavensnotebook.com/2025/12/17/n...

UNC, once a storied R1 uni & a reason the Research Triangle is in North Carolina, is eliminating 14 research and teaching centers and institutes, cuts projected to reduce $7 million in total expenses over several years. This at an institution happy to pay a losing football coach $10 million a year.

“Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Glaciers in the Alps are likely to reach their peak rate of extinction in only 8 years, with more than 100 due to melt away permanently by 2033. Glaciers in the western US and Canada are forecast to reach their peak year of loss less than a decade later, with more than 800 disappearing each year.

Gift article. Climate change makes snow more rare and fleeting, and zoom means kids don’t even get school snow days anymore. (Boooooo!) This article recalls the joys of snow in NYC; it was even more rare and wondrous in my Alabama childhood. Remember Snow Days? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/s...

“Terrible, but hopefully less apocalyptic than originally feared” may sum up our climatic moment: “The history of the last 10 years in climate politics is one of glaring contradictions, forward leaps followed by backsliding, and cooperation attended by fracture.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

TIL Steve Bannon was the CEO of Biosphere 2. (Admittedly, I only kind of hazily remember the whole thing from the early 90s, but 🤯 nevertheless.)

“Also gone is a website quantifying the physical and economic risks. The effect is to isolate climate change from the issues that affect people’s lives, Gehrke said: “It’s specifically targeting the information about why we should care.”

“Gehry’s houses looked like nothing else in Los Angeles, but they were in the spirit of the city’s greatest art form: its houses. They made Gehry famous, though six decades later, none of us lives in anything like them. Instead, fame gave Gehry monuments to build.” www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

If you want any books on the history of the Civil War, Civil Rights, slavery, Native Americans, westward expansion, science, and presumably much more, you soon won’t be able to buy many of them at a national park. apnews.com/article/nati...

From tree scarcity to fire hazards, the wild history of artificial Xmas trees.🎄 (A friend found a 1960s aluminum Christmas tree in storage at her mom’s house and set it up one year, in all of its spectacular space-aged atomic glory, complete with a revolving colored spotlight. It was wild! 🚀🎄🚀)

Yesterday, I saw @marisakabas.bsky.social post that she was writing about someone new in the Trump administration who was "a turducken of evil," and I thought to myself, "This better not be about FEMA," and reader, it was absolutely about FEMA. www.thehandbasket.co/p/conspiracy...

6 decades ago, Charles Schulz and a collection of California TV, animation, and music pros transformed his memories of Minnesota winters into iconic TV, reminding us all that Christmas is a time for morose rumination, depressive thinking, great music, and futile railing against commerce. 🎄😜🎄

Like smog events in other cities—in the US, the ones in LA were most infamous— these catastrophic events haltingly led to anti-pollution & air quality regulations. When a corporation says they are a burden, they really mean they’d rather you get sick or die than they make a little less money.

Joy & sadness in Altadena: “Stephanie Gates…grew up in Altadena and…said she hasn’t been able to visit any place in the community but Mountain View Cemetery, where her mother is buried. She drove in at night, she said, so she wouldn’t have to see all that was lost.” www.latimes.com/lifestyle/st...

All of Gehry‘s work was remarkable, but to remember only his later starchitect buildings (Bilbao, etc.) is akin to remembering only the Guggenheim and forgetting Fallingwater and Wright’s Prairie School houses in Oak Park.

"This astonishing paper shows how much we've underestimated the geographic range, productivity, and sustainability of intensive Indigenous agriculture across North America.”

Short thread. His impact was global, but no other architect was more identified with Los Angeles. The starchitecture of his later years is more spectacular, but his earlier work in LA, using vernacular forms and materials in conversation with the cityscape, remains insightful and significant.

Reposted with examples from another moment of hallucinatory food imagery, citrus labels from 1880s-1920s California, an agricultural abundance/health/wealth/real estate/racial rejuvenation settler colonialism fantasia. (Though Californians were mere pikers in the giant citrus as UFOs department.)

Another informative and alarming installment by this PBS series on the looming, irreversible danger of sea level rise this century. (Depressingly, it has just started a Patreon, since federal funding for this kind of educational/climate/etc. content has been eliminated.) youtu.be/bg7x6mlD5Js?...

Our infrastructure isn’t ready for what’s coming.

Whatever part of the late American empire you want to see, it’s all here: water and power-guzzling AI, tech bros, security goons, brothel owners, wild horses, failed crypto utopias, and Indigenous people trying to preserve water rights and nature while the American West gets ravaged one more time.

One of the great delights of researching travel and tourism history is tourism ephemera—postcards, pamphlets, etc. It rarely survives, and even more rarely gets preserved in an archive. But when it does, you can discover amazing things like this, a 19th century souvenir of a trip down the Rhine.

From Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906 to today, middle class & wealthy consumers have fretted about food safety and demanded reform, but cared much less about worker safety and welfare. This article makes us attend to the people and places that deliver all that delectable fish to our tables.

This cartoon car ride may actually be going better than the negotiations are.

So the Sharpie pen saved us all?!?

“That this level of loss is happening to a tree long known for its hardiness, able to withstand sizzling heat and excruciatingly dry summers, not to mention the usual outbursts of pine beetles and blight and wildfires, is indicative of just how deeply we’ve altered conditions on the planet.”

A lovely piece on the beautiful & perilous San Gabriels, and people trying to better understand & care for them, and all the “temporary inhabitants of a place both blessed and cursed, tucked between ancient peaks and rising sea, with no greater calling than to be better stewards of our inheritance.”

Gift article: “Climate skeptics present their position as “projecting rationality, authority, and masculine self-control” while those who acknowledge global warming “are depicted through emotionally charged, feminized, and irrational imagery” and labeled “alarmists.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

Gift article on “growing tension within the real estate industry. Fires, floods and other disasters are posing more risks to homes as the planet warms, but forecasting exactly which houses are most vulnerable—and might sell for less—has proved fraught.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

Short thread: Walt Disney loved Palm Springs and the elite enclave Smoke Tree Ranch. He owned a home there he sold to help finance Disneyland. Close by was Thunderbird, one of the first US suburban golf course residential developments. It inspired many copies, as well as Ford’s iconic automobile.

Elliott Erwitt, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. New York City, USA. 1988.

Gift article. With sea level rise, even a minor future hurricane could prove disastrous for NYC, a city lying on coasts and islands: One model “showed a 16-foot storm surge, two feet higher than Sandy’s, which when combined with a torrential downpour, could put 25 percent of the city under water.”

Its politicians are busy hyping Winter Olympics in 2034—when there’s currently no skiable snow in 2025—but it’s this looming disaster that will decide whether Salt Lake City (and regional population of 2.8 million), is still habitable, let alone a winter sports Mecca. www.sltrib.com/news/environ...

“The Trump administration’s disinterest in appointing a permanent director may bode poorly for the agency’s long-term future.” “This is the third acting FEMA administrator within a year.”

In 1924, Calvin Coolidge's 16-yr-old son played tennis on the White House grounds w/o wearing socks. He got a blister and was dead from infection a week later. This is unthinkable today—which is why I wrote this series. Cuz the systems that save us from this kind of fate are in urgent need of care.