Monday Reads: Catching Up
- God Only Knows sounds so good done live, solo, and slow on the ukelele. (swoon)
- Hipster (or, er, yupster) parents dis on my childhood soundtrack. I second Ellen - Don't you talk about Raffi that way! (morethan7)
- Sounds like progress to me: the big corporations are starting to come around on climate change. (Grist)
We have to deal with greenhouse gases. From Shell's point of view, the debate is over. When 98 percent of scientists agree, who is Shell to say, 'Let's debate the science'?
- I really liked this piece by Mr. Safran Foer. It's about having a dog in the city and letting her off the leash - and something more, too. (NYT)
We have been having this latter debate, in different forms, for ages. Again and again we are confronted with the reality — some might say the problem — of sharing our space with other living things, be they dogs, trees, fish or penguins. Dogs in the park are a present example of something that is often too abstracted or far away to gain our consideration.The very existence of parks is a response to this debate: earlier New Yorkers had the foresight to recognize that if we did not carve out places for nature in our cities, there would be no nature. It was recently estimated that Central Park’s real estate would be worth more than $500 billion. Which is to say we are half a trillion dollars inconvenienced by trees and grass. But we do not think of it as an inconvenience. We think of it as balance.