Day: October 7, 2019

America: There’s a lot going on right now. President Trump is facing possible impeachment for turning “American foreign policy into an extortion racket,” as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp put it. Meanwhile, the 2020 presidential primary is looming, the oceans are becoming hostile to life, and a recession could be around the corner.

What an anxious time to be alive!

It’s also a great time to take joy in a national treasure: The very good and fat bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska. Fat Bear Week is back, baby.

Over the past week, the employees of Katmai National Park …

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania’s governor announced his state was moving to join the Northeast’s carbon market, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. In 2018, we explained how the states that are already part of RGGI are receiving substantial dividends from the program while also reducing emissions. Read it here:

When climate hawks fantasize about climate policy, they tend to imagine a sweeping, economy-wide carbon tax, set at a high and rising rate. But as a political strategy, this hasn’t much worked; political restraints have meant that no such tax has emerged in the real world.

But there is another political strategy, …

In May, the journal Pediatrics published some alarming data: In the past decade, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of teens attempting to kill themselves with poison. The trend has been largely driven by increases in poisoning attempts by young girls.

Overall, the study, which drew from poison control center reports, estimated that in 2018, close to 60,000 girls ages 10 to 18 tried to poison themselves, twice as many as in 2008. Those figures were pulled from a larger dataset of more than a million self-poisonings recorded in people ages 10 to 25 years old …

At its dark little heart, Succession has a lot in common with the cringe comedy, the show where humor comes from how much embarrassment the characters suffer and how little the universe seems to care that they are in pain. The most notable example for American audiences is The Office, but if you’ve ever seen the original (and superior) British version of that show, then you know how good the Brits are at plumbing the depths of our most embarrassing selves for fun and giggles.

Well, Jesse Armstrong — Succession’s creator and the writer of “DC,” the second …